[3.6] Milky's Scorching Ray Totems (updating process)

+ Can do almost every mapmod

+ Most of the Damage comes from the Skilltree and Jewels

+ Can played as a Magic Finder, High Damage or Tanky Character.

+ Great Leaguestarter with little gear requirements

+ High Tier maps viable

+ Can do any challenge and boss in the game

o medium clearspeed, could be faster but also slower

- Totem RF casting may be too delayed in really good Partys.

- Annoying against some fleeing Enemys.

- RF totems of different player dont stack.

Righteous Fire, Scorching Ray and Searing Bond scale (almost) with the same damage nodes. Righteous Fire gets a few more options.

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ALL Totems:

Multiple RF Totems do NOT stack the damage, but different sources of fire degeneration do.

Multiple Scorching Ray Totems DO stack the damage. Don´t ask me why ;)

Righteous Fire + Scorching Ray + Searing Bond can all deal damage at the same time.

Fire/Elemental Penetration does nothing for those totems or degeneration effects in general

There Totems count as a burns, not as a ignite. This means that ignite immune bosses like atziri still take the full damage.

Righteous Fire Totem (RFT):

Further referenced as RFT

RFT deals damage depending on the casters life and energy shield(40% per second).
RFT use the Totem Life, not the Player Life, to deal damage. Stuff that grants totemlife is a good damage source.

Spell Damage won't increase the Damage of RFT!


Searing Bond(SB):

Further referenced as SB

It scales with the same stats as the Righteous Fire Totem except Area Damage and Totem Life. It acts as an additional Totem over our Totem limit.

Spell Damage won't increase the Damage of SB!

Scorching Ray Totem (RFT):

Further referenced as RFT

It reduces the enemy resistance to fire by up to -24% (3% per stack up to 8).
The damage of multiple SRT stack, the debuff however stays capped at -24%

Spell Damage DOES increase the Damage of Scorching Ray

Curses:
There are some sources of additional curses. The Keystone Whispers of Doom, corruption on Amulets and several Unique Items. Its possible to Selfcast them, use a Curse on Hit Setup or with Blasphemy.
Curses have -60% effect on bosses, -80% Guardians and Shaper and there are mapmods which reduce our curse effect or make enemys immune to curses.
I usually stay away from going too ham into curses, 1-2 are usually enough. Especially a defensive curse on Blasphemy helps survivability in maps a lot.


Elemental Weakness grants us -% all resistance
Flammability grants us -% fire resistance
Despair grants 28% more degeneration damage.
Enfeeble reduces the enemy Damage, Critchance, Critmultiplier and Hitchance.
Temporal Chains slows Enemys and increases the Duration of Debuffs.

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Elemental Equilibrium (EE):

Further referenced as EE

It is a Keystone that gives the Enemy -50% Fire resistance if we apply Cold or Lightning damage. With Dual Totems we can´t deal damage, but we can with Totems, Traps and Mines. (Vaal) Lightning Trap and Ice Trap are good to trigger the debuff
ED is not important for Packs, they die really fast without it.
It has its strength in high Resist Maps and against Bosses and Curse Immune Rares. It ALWAYS reduces the max Resist by 50% regardless of Boss curse effectiveness.
The degeneration effect from RFT, SB and SRT do not apply EE!

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Elemental Overload(EO)
With this node we gain 40% more elemental damage after we crit. This does not work with traps, mines and similar, the player has to Crit himself to get the buff.
For this we use Orb of Storms
The Orb has the advantage that he stays up for 6sec and every single lightningprocc has his seperate critchance.

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Soulmantle, Kikazaru Rings or Atziris Reflection and Self-Flagellation Jewel
This is a powerful combination in the build.


Atziris reflection



Soulmantle is powerful because we get a free link with the lvl 20 spelltotem and 50% totemlife, which is the best way to increase our damage output. On top we gain one additional totem for more screencoverage with RFT or singletarget with SRT

The Downside is that everytime a totem dies, runs out of duration or replaced by a new one we are cursed with a random lvl 20 curse.

To counter these curses we use two Kikazaru Rings or Atziris Reflection.

Two Kikazaru reduce the effect of curses by 80%.
The liferegen per Ring is around 1-2% of the life depending on the character level and total life.
With those Rings we only need 93 elemental resistance (to be overcapped against two elemental curses at the same time (instead of 169 for just the elemental weakness mapmod cap).
The sad thing is that the ring has no life.

Atziris Reflection is new in 3.2 and ignore the effect of all curse, has good resists, some curse effect and decent ES/Evasion.
Since its only obtainable from a prophecy (rarity?) that requires a Uber Atziri kill (one of the hardes bosses) i expect it to be pretty expensive, ranging for something like 10 chaos to 10 ex depending on which league and the state of the league.

Kikazaru is great as the entry item, atziris reflection for later (but not required)

Self-Flagellation benefits from being cursed. This jewel negates the effect of the weak enfeeble debuff and even adds damage on top.

Here are the remaining debuffs of curses with 80% reduced curse effectiveness of Kikazaru:

"

Poachers Mark: 9.8% less evasion, life/mana gained on hit and frenzy on kill are meaningless

Projectile Weakness: 10% knockback from Projectiles, Projectiles deal 8.8% more damage

Temporal Chains: should have no effect with its 40% reduced effect on players. If it still has an effect its a 5.8% slow

Assassins Mark: 1,8% critchance, 4% critmulti

Conductivity: 8,8% lightning resistance, 2.8% chance to shock by lightning dmg

Elemental Weakness: 7,8% elemental resistances

Enfeeble: 5% reduced critchance, 6% less damage

Flammability: 8,8% Fire resistance, 2.8% chance to be ignited by fire dmg

Frostbite: 8,8% Cold resistance, 2.8% chance to be Frozen by cold dmg

Vulnerability: 5,8% more physical damage taken, 4% chance to bleed/maim, 5,4% more dot phys dmg taken

Punishment: we dont attack and don´t apply the "punisher" buff. Should have no effect.

Warlords mark: 6% reduced stun and block recovery, 0,4% leech and 2% chance to be stunned

Numbers are rounded UP in the game

Atziris reflection nullifies everything

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Swift Affliction and Righteous Fire

Many players get confused or don´t understand the Swift Affliction interaction with RF.

Normally SA does not work with RF if you use it with your character.
RF damage is a degeneration effect, but has no duration. You turn it on or off (ignite removal, 1hp or death).

Linked with a spelltotem it works.
The reason is: Spelltotem support has a Duration and Totem ´tag´ in the tooltip which are now combined with RF.

Both together create a skill that places a totem which casts RF (degeneration) over a duration (over time) of 8 seconds (+/- with duration nodes and Swift Affliction). It´s now a DoT..

It works for the same reason Totem Damage increases the RF damage when its on a spelltotem or trap damage increases the damage of a skill with the trap support. Some Supportgem or Threshold Jewels grant new Tags to a skill which let you support the skill with new stuff that originally didn´t work.

Havent played the build in 3.1 due to the lack of changes for it. In 3.2 i will upload new one for sure!

3.0 Beta

The intention of the playthroughs is to help newer players in the leveling process with this build

3.0 Act 1 Marauder Playthrough
3.0 Act 2 Marauder Playthrough
3.0 Act 3 Marauder Playthrough
3.0 Act 4 Marauder Playthrough

2.6:
Video Guide Should be informative, but its long (35 mins) and might bore you a bit :P

Full Uber Atziri run E T H I C A L

Full Deathless Shaper run E T H I C A L

Uber Atziri Kill

1/2 of a ghosted phoenix fight

My shitty leveling guide for 2.6 RF Totems

like i said, no editing and just sat down to make a "quick" video before the league starts, so no ziggyD quality standard video :P

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2.4:
2.4 Uber Lab 1
2.4 Uber Lab 2
2.4 Chimera No mentionable mapmods, first try ever, last phase worked the best, deathless

NOTE: This is my last 3.0 character, will post my 3.2 char when he's at a decent level!

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAECAAN1BLMOPBDMEmkUIBRxFm8XHBo4HNwdFB8YIZAkqiW8Jy8o-iu2LKc1kjbpOtg64TwFPC09_EWdSsRN41BHUftTUlZIWGNY5VnzWiteXV8EXz9f0GZUZp5nm2hYaGVo8nF5cg9yqXaseGl8g337ggeCm4Nfg8yFe4nYjEaMz48aj0aQVZitmjua4J1jna6f36IAplenCKdtp5Ssqq2Nrj63PriTwxPDaMT2xq7G2M0Wz37R_deW2CTYvdl820_fv-DD4Njhc-Nq5FHqEOoY6-7sOO8O73zwH_JB8kXz3fZI9q73Mvhf-JP46_rS_gr-jw==?accountName=Milkyslice&characterName=MilkyHeringer



The gear is really bad, especially my jewels.

41c was the total cost of the gear, add a 5l prophecy for 24c on top if you want. With this i did any content up to Shaper.

I don´t care about improving the char further, because he fulfilled his purpose (starting the league to unlock everything i want while saving currency).

Thing i would improve are the jewels, especially a 20% self-flagellation and 3 (useful) property jewels.
Then i would switch the granite flask with a rumi´s and add at least 30% chaos resist somewhere on the gear.

a 6link would help especially in the endgame encounter

The scorching ray setup felt the best for me without triple totems. Stacks get up quickly and stay relatively long on the boss. The debuff is more important than damage from that skill.

The following links will probably break with the 3.2 release and they don't contain the Hierophant changes yet.

poeurl.com/bLR4 Level 94 Tree

Ancestral Bond is not used. We already have 4 totems + SB. We would loose the ability to trigger EE ourself and need clunky traps for it. If you really want skill it for 1 point and use the trapgem.

A jewel with 9% totem resistance is needed to cap the Totem resistances since we dont use ironwood anymore (not worth the traveling without BloodMagic).

Mind over Matter is now used with the nicr synergy of the hierophant. Tons of manaregen and max mana make it worth it.


poeurl.com/bLR7 The core skilltree.

This is what you really want. All the traveling nodes are skilled and the biggest nodes are taken. After that point invest in lifenodes, damage or jewels (if you have some) like you need it. Found some great sceptre early on and you probably need less dmg for excample.

Pics are coming the next days

Chest:





should be leveled as well. Its a good swap for increased area of effect on stationary bosses.

With a Soulmantle there is no need for the spelltotem gem.

In that case we use Efficacy as the 6th gem.

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Four Link 1:



swap critchance with elemental weakness of enfeeble if you dualcurse

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Four Link 2:



Gloves with Essence of Delirium are the best place for the setup (but expensive to craftgood ones)

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Four Link 3:


Scorching Ray is mainly used to debuff bosses with up to -24% fire resistance while dealing a bit of damage. This is the setup i prefered, because the ramp up of the debuff is fast and it keeps longer on the enemys.

You can use a Spelltotem, Elemental focus and Burning Damage and deal some damage with it as well.

A totem setup is less clunky to use in some fights, but it reduces the amount of rf totems you can place.

test around and use what feels the best for you, nothing wrong with any route. Your can even just use a single SR gem just for a short debuff

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Shield/Offhand:




Leap Slam is also a good option for the labyrinth, indoor maps and zones with many cliffs. Doesnt get bocked by terrain so much.

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Weapon:

Ok this slot highly depends on your preference. i cover some good gemchoices:

A bit liferegeneration and endurance charge generation on demand

liferegen and sometimes a taunt. I like a high lvl cast when damage taken with it because i am lazy

- coupled with cast when damage taken and enduring cry very useful. The levels of cwdt and IC depend on your character life. low life, low gemlevel. high life, high gemlevel.

- needed with ancestral bond to trigger elemental equilibrium. which one you use doesn´t matter, pick the one you have a free color for

- very useful in dangerous encounters. might not work well with constant berserker warcry taunting haven´t tested it yet with a berserker



i recommend the following setups:

With Ancestral Bond
Stonegolem or Decoy Totem + Enduring Cry + Ice/Lightning Trap

Without Ancestral Bond

Enduring Cry + cwdt + immortal call

Enduring Cry + Stone golem + high lvl cast when damage taken

Enduring/Rallying Cry + Stone Golem + Decoy Totem - the best of everything, but recasting the golem can be annoying

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Quality Gems

I often read the question what are the best quality gems. All Quality values are for 20%:

Top quality:
Curse on Hit - 10% curse effect
Elemental Weakness - 5% all resi reduction
Temporal Chains - 10% slower enemys
Enfeeble (if you choose to use it) - 10% reduced accuracy and critchance
Decoy Totem - 20% increased Totem Life

Useless or bad quality:

Those will net us NO benefit

Righteous Fire - spelldmg
Cast when damage taken - inc dmg for supported skills
Flammability - ignite duration
Orb of Lightning - lightning dmg

okish quality, good to have but not a must have

Spelltotem - 20% totem placement speed
Swift Affliction - 10% inc dot dmg
Searing Bond - 20% totem life
Bloodmagic - 10% reduced mana cost
Elemental Focus - 10% inc ele dmg
inc burning damage - 10% inc burning dmg
Ice Trap - 10% AoE
Golems - 20% inc golem life & dmg
Enduring Cry - 30% AoE
Rallying Cry - 15% inc duration
inc duration - 10% inc duration
inc AoE - 10% inc AoE dmg
conc effect - 10% inc AoE dmg

Kill all bandits and grab the 2 skillpoints.

Its the most flexible choice.

Major God

Soul of Lunaris is on its own not so strong, but after capturing Lycius its very powerful for any totem/minion build. Avoiding projectiles that chain counters one of the biggest weaknesses of totem builds. besides that it offers some mitigation here and there.

overall all major gods offer something useful and we can switch around like we want. Solaris is a good choice for atziri and in critmaps, Arakaali helps a lot against chaos damage and often gains benefit of extra recovery.

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For the Lesser Gods Soul of Shakaari is my favourite with poison immunity and some chaos dmg reduction. Garukhan, Gruthkul and Ryslatha are also good choices

Alternative Gear options are covered in the post below this one.
I only write about the best in slot items for this Soulmantle version in this post

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Chest



Its the prefered chest for raw power (explained in the Informations).

Until this use a rare chest with life and resists or a Tabula Rasa

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Helmet


medium life, decent armour, 30-40% firedamage and freeze/chill immunity after using a fireskill (any totem). A good mix of Utility, damage and Defence. The Chill Immunity is awesome for Chilled Ground maps as well.

A Rare Helmet with Armour/Life/Resist/Rarity - preferable with a useful helmet enchant - will be defensively stronger

The elder mods for Burning dmg and less duration are decent for SB. The burning dmg also comes with global burning smg for all skills.

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Weapon


Doryanis Catalyst is a stable in the build.

Rare Sceptres with Firedamage% and Burning damage% CAN be better than a doryani if other stats are useful as well. Keep your eyes open for those!
Besides Fire/Burning dmg we look for stuff like attack speed (faster shield charge), mana, manaregen, castspeed or spellcrit. (you cannot get it all)

Do NOT get any added fire damage for spells on you weapon or other gear!!! It will increase enemy resistances with Elemental Equilibrium!

Balefire is also an option for SR. If its cheap at least, but i dont know the leaguestartpricea of it.

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Shield

Atziris Reflection (new in 3.2). If you can obtain one you no longer need Kikazaru's, until then use other shields. Curses have no effect on us with this shield, which negates the soulmantle drawback while gaining full benefit of self-flagellation. The good resists and curse effect are also nice.


Tons of life, armour and Block. If you have capped resists without a shield its a great choice!

Then we can use a Rare Shield with high Armour, Life and Resists. Especially useful if you want extra chaos resistance.

Tukohamas fortress is no longer a chase item since it hurts more than it helps on a hierophant with MoM for a relatively small bonis with so many totems.

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Boots

Rare Boots with 30%+ Movementspeed, Life and Resistance.

An elder mod for a spelltotem (lvl20+) is really nice to have.

The shaper mod for a decoy totem is also good and frees a gemslot in the gear.

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Gloves

Rare Gloves with Life, Resists and Armour.

Essence of delirium can be good for 30% more dot dmg (SR or SB)

Shaper gloves with blind support are useful for OoS.

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Rings


two times. with atziris reflection not needed

Before those just use Rings with life and resistances. Mana and manaregen are good as well.

top rare rings are on a opal ring with firedmg%, have life and some resists.

Shaper/Elder items dont offer anything great for us.

Pyre is also a good option.

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Amulet

Rare Amulet with with Life, Resists, Dexterity, Firedmg%. Especially Dexterity is important to level Gems.

The best elder mod is liferegen% i would say. There are some useful ones, but nothing exceptionally great to hunt for.

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Belt
Life, Resists and Flaskmods. Preferable on a Stygian Vise.

elder belts offer %life and rallying/enduring cry which can be handy.

If you dont need resists on the slot Cyclopian Coil is good. High life, Ignite and Shock immunity (usually) and around 20-30% inc dmg.

Darkness Enthroned can be useful as well with top tier Abyss jewels.

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Flasks

I recommend:

Bubbling Divine Life Flask

Catalysed Divine Mana Flask (seems the best, but other choices might be better)

Quicksilver Flask of Adrenaline - Experimenter's, Chemist's and Perpetual all work

Granite Flask - Experimenter's, Chemist's and Perpetual all work

Chemist's Basalt Flask


"of Staunching" removes Bleed and has to be on one flask
"of Heat" removes Freeze and has to be on one flask without Hrimnors Resolve
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"of Grounding" removes Shock and can be helpful
"of Curing" removes Poison and can be helpful
"of Iron Skin" grants 60-100% armour an can be helpful
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Additional useful Flasks are:

Sulphur Flask for a damage and liferegen bonus
Amethyst Flask if you have problems with chaos damage
Bismuth Flask can be useful if all resists are bad
Topaz, Ruby and Sapphire can be swapped in for encounter with high elemental damage
Silver Flask for more speed

For Unique Flasks we can use:

Blood of the Karui - Recover much hp in a short time
Forbidden Taste - heals you for 75-100% hp instantly. Great panic flask!
Rumi's Concoction - for armour, block and spellblock


Any of the Utility or Unique Flask can be swapped in for your needs, just keep something for bleed and Freeze removal!

Spire of Stone is a very good jewel for this build. It gives a good chunk of Totem Life and Stun Immunity for Totems. With this the Totems cant be interrupted by stuns while casting RF or SR.

Self Flagellation is a stable if we have a Soulmantle and Kikazaru/Atziris Reflection. it grants 10-20% increased damage per curse on us. Usually we have 3-10 on us.

Fill the rest with rare Jewels, those stats are important:

- Player life
- Burning damage
- Fire Damage
- Totem Damage
- Damage over Time
- increased damage

optional:

- Totem Life (dropped out of favour since it only boosts 1 out of 3 totems)
- Area Damage (only increases Righteous Fire, not Searing Bond)
- Player Resist
- Rarity
- Dexterity


Totem life is still the best dps stat for Righteous Fire Totems, but Burning Damage (has a 16-20% roll) grants more overall damage if we include searing bond.

I would aim for the stats that affect all totems.

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Abyss Jewels

Prefixes:

Life
Mana
DoT while holding a shield

Life/manaregen are okish

Suffix:

Dexterity
Resists
Life/manaregen% while moving

hinder on spellhit is okish for OoS

Abyss jewels are overall not that great for the build dps wise.

There are no wrong questions in general, but there are many questions already answered IF you read the guide.

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How can I procc Elemental Overload

I use Orb of Lightning for this.

We need to selfcast something to procc Elemental Overload, Totems or Traps won't do that
OoS has a high triggerrate and every trigger can potentially crit, which grants the Elemental Overload buff.

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How can I procc Elemental Equilibrium?

I use Ice/LightningTrap and Vaal Lightning Trap for this.

We need to deal Lightning or Cold damage to get a beneficial EE procc. We cant deal damage ourself and the degeneration effects of Righteous Fire and Searing Bond wont procc EE.

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Check my gear, what do i need to upgrade?

If you got the best in slot unique items get better rares. See Gear section for what we desire.
Get the dexrequirements via gear, cap resists, get life everywhere possible.
After that point try to overcap resists (for elemental weakness maps or monster curses), get some chaos resists, more defence (upgrading your 100 armour gloves to 600 armour gloves etc.) and higher life rolls.
Enchant the gear and/or try some essence crafting.

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Why don´t you use Fire Penetration?

Penetration gems/skillnodes only work on hits, not damage over time effects

Path of Building The best offline planner aviable in my opinion

Path of Building youtube Guide

Tool to calculate AoE nodes/gear with your skill for 2.6 This also has DPS calculation in it!

Calculator to chrome items