[3.0] Blade Flurry Inquisitor softcore league starter guide

Hi everyone!

Pretty much since Atlas, my goal for every league start has been to get to Shaped and guardians as quickly as possible and to farm them for the next week or two to make my budget for the rest of the league. This is a build that I've used as a starter in Breach, FoO beta and I'm currently playing in Harbinger, where I managed to kill Shaper two days into the league. It's not the tankiest build and dies to plenty of things, it doesn't have the highest clearspeed or the best single target dps, but I find it to be a reasonable compromise between the two, while also being fairly cheap and easy to put together in a fresh economy. A while ago I have posted a couple of videos of Shaper and guardian kills from FoO beta and some people were interested and wanted to follow my build, so now I've finally come around to writing a guide for it.

Since it's a starter guide, I'll go into a lot of detail about leveling and explain some basic mechanics, but here's most of what you need to know:

Character profile

PoB pastebin - https://pastebin.com/6101uGEV

Bandits - kill all, get 2 passives

Pantheon - Yugul and Brine King


A video of a full 4 guardians+shaper run, that's what I'm currently doing 95% of the time.

bonus clip - phoenix fight with ele reflect :D


LEVELING

There are different ways to level this build depending on gear and currency you have , but I'm just gonna go through how I did it starting from scratch on a new league.

Leveling tree

Templar doesn't get any good attack skills at start, so before Sunder at lvl 12, I think the best option is to level as Frostbolt + Fire Trap. So first make a shadow character, get fire trap as a reward for killing Hillock, run straight through to Hailrake in tidal island skipping all mobs. After you kill him, get a quicksilver flask from the quest reward, stash fire trap and the flask, and log onto the templar. As templar pick frostbolt as your first quest reward, buy Arcane Surge Support from Nessa, and that + fire trap is what you'll use util level 12. On templar you want to turn in your medicine chest quest at level 4, so that you get an itemlevel 4 quicksilver that can roll immunity to chill and freeze on it, it'll be very useful later on.

When you complete The Siren's Cadence quest, you'll be able to buy Sunder from Nessa, and that's the skill you're gonna be using for the rest of leveling. Sunder only attacks with your main hand weapon, so you want to go dual wield to get 10% more attack speed and 20% more melee physical damage bonuses, and in the offhand just use a weapon that gives some useful passive bonus. Ideally with the first alch you find you want to buy



it's basially a Hatred sitting in your offhand and you won't need anything better until you respec to blade flurry.

Gem setups by levels:

12 - your 3 link should be Sunder - Added Fire Damage - Ruthless + an unlinked Ancestral Protector that you put down any time you need the % more attack speed bonus from it.
16 - start using Herald of Ash.
18 - change your setup to Sunder - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Physical to Lightning + Melee Physical Damage when you get your 4link.
24 - start using Hatred. If 25% unreserved mana feels uncomfortable, just turn off Herald of Ash for now, you can start using it again when you get mana leech on the tree.
28 - Ancestral Warchief - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Physical to Lightning - Melee Physical Damage as a second 4link. It does a lot of damage, but also gives % more melee damage while the totem is active, so use it whenever you face something that'll last longer than a couple of hits.
31 - you need to do A Fixture Of Fate quest in act 3, grab the following gems and start leveling them on weapon swap - Wrath, Added Lightning Damage, Added Cold Damage, Increased Critical Strikes and Herald of Ice, Blade Flurry.

Weapons - for your main hand weapon you want to use a mace/axe with good physical damage, but even if you don't get any good weapons from drops it's not a problem, since you can use a rustic sash vendor recipe. Just use some of the essences you find on rustics and with them make a new weapon every 6-8 levels.
At level 60 for an alch you can get Cameria's Maul, that should carry you through the rest of leveling.

From The Key to Freedom quest in act 5 you want to get a Stibnite Flask and use it while leveling, it helps a lot with survivability and allows to facetank some things, and from The Silver Locket in act 7 you get a diamond flask that you're going to use later.

Labyrinth - when you complete all trials in acts 1-3 and get a 4link you can do your first lab and get Instruments of Virtue. You don't need to do 2nd and 3rd labyrinth until you complete the story and respec to blade flurry.

TRANSITION TO BLADE FLURRY

After you complete the story, you can buy a rapier, a 5link and finally respec to blade flurry. You should have enough respec points from quests to change your tree to this. It's also time to start using a diamond flask.

Flasks

There aren't too many flasks that affect pure elemental damage, so not much of a choice here, these are the flasks i use:



It's very convenient to have freeze and curse immunity on diamond and stibnite because they have very low charge cost allowing you to use them on every other trash pack, as you should. Curse immunity now works on map mods, so it's really good to have, i prefer it on stibnite for max uptime. And seriously, get a stibnite flask. It lowers target's hit chance by 50%, greatly improving your survivability and allowing you with some luck to facetank even things that oneshot you, like a double damage -max res minotaur.

Vessel of Vinktar is also an option, but it gives almost same damage as silver, only has one use and requires a shock immunity on another flask, so in my opinion not really worth using.

Weapons

For bf we want to use a rapier and a stat stick. Blade flurry only works with swords/daggers/claws, so if you equip a mace or an axe in your offhand, instead of alternating weapons it will always attack with main hand weapon, but you will also get the 10% more attack speed benefit from dual wielding and you also get passive stats from the offhand weapon. Ideally you want to use Doryani's Catalyst, but since it's rather expensive, before you get it you can use

don't forget to socket your Wrath in it for +1 level.

Rapier

I use rapiers because of high attack speed, good implicit and good and conveniently placed sword crit nodes on the tee. For a rapier you want one with high attack speed and crit. A thing about "buzzsaw" builds like this one is that elemental damage from your weapon only makes for a small portion of all flat elemental damage you get from gear/auras/support gems. Aps and crit on the other hand scale all of that damage. So when buying your first rapier, don't focus too much on ele dps, just get something with 1.8 aps and 7+ crit. For a chaos or two you should be able to get something like this
Even a rapier like this is good enough to carry you through all maps up to guardians and Shaper, and at that point you'll be able to afford something with more ele dps and crit multiplier, but even then aps and crit remain a priority.

Gem links

Now you're going to use all the gems you leveled on swap, your 5l is Blade Flurry - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Added Lightning Damage - Increased Critical Strikes - Added Cold Damage

Other gem setups you want to use are:

Herald of Ice - Curse on Hit - Assassin's Mark - Onslaught

Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks - Fortify - Blood Magic

Ancestral Protector - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Added Lightning Damage - Increased Critical Strikes. If you have fire damage on your weapon or jewelry you can replace added lightning damage with immolate. In that 4link ancestral protector does about 1/5th of the dps of blade flurry, so it's worth positioning it in a way that it can attack the boss.

Leap Slam - Faster Attacks to jump between levels or get over obstacles

Wrath, Summon Ice Golem

For the couple of leftover gem slots you can do a cwdt - vortex to chill enemies, a cwdt - immortal call or really anything else you want. You can also use blood rage, but i personally find it unnecessary and pretty uncomfortable.

Start leveling Increased Area of Effect and Concentrated Effect on swap, you're gonna use them as your 6th link, swapping aoe for conc on endgame bosses.

LABYRINTH 2 and 3

Now it's time to do second and third labs. Go Righteous Providence => Inevitable Judgement, leaving Augury of Penitence for the uber lab. Inevitable Judgement pretty much makes the build, so you should definitely get it before you start mapping.



GEARING UP

After you got your bf setup running your priorities are: get life on every rare slot and cap all resists without res on helmet => Rat's Nest/Starkonja's Head => jewelry with Elemental Damage with Attack Skills => gloves with attack speed => a rare 6l chest => Doryani's Catalyst, at which point you can get a Belly of the Beast and start linking it. You also want to get global critical stike multiplier on amulet and accuracy on a couple of slots so that you are at around 90% hit chance. Note that with levels your accuracy is going to diminish, at level 90 you ideally want 300+ accuracy on a couple of pieces. On jewels you're looking for life%, attack speed with swords/while dual wielding and global/melee crit multi/with one handed. Ideally you want life + 2 dps stats, but jewels like that are pretty expensive, so life + 1 will do.

http://poe.trade/search/inagahamokomom
Here's a search template for jewels, when you're ready to go for some more expensive ones just change the min count from 1 to 2.

Also, you'll have to get some int from amu/rings since Wrath has a pretty high int requirement of 155 at level 20.

From the point you cap your resists and get a decent amount of life it should go pretty smooth. A lot of the damage comes from just gem levels, so even without further gear upgrades you'll still be making progress. To be able to reliably do endgame content you only need a catalyst, rare 6l and level 19 gems, so chances are you'll be ready for it before you even get there.

Couple of tips for Shaper:

Positioning. Before you start doing damage, always make sure you're standing as close to him as possible. His melee range is very small and as soon as you get out of it he's gonna start shooting balls at you.
Facetankikng. Even without flasks, golem and totem, you should still be able to outleech his beam damage, even if you're standing in a puddle or his clone is meleeing you. So facetanking is safe and that way you also get more dps uptime.
Timings. Turn up dialogue volume, every phase starts as soon as he's done talking. For maximum dps, right before a phase starts you can resummon your golem to proc 50% damage from Instruments of Virtue and start charging your bf. His slam animation is pretty slow and you only have to start dodging it after he reappears on top of you, so that way you can sneak in another second of dps.

Even in your POB build with nothing else changed, bf > inc aoe > immolate > wed >added cold >ruthless increased the sheet dps by 200k, you still retain your ailment effects and gain more dmg while losing a bit of crit, what do you think ?

"

punks7yle wrote:

Even in your POB build with nothing else changed, bf > inc aoe > immolate > wed >added cold >ruthless increased the sheet dps by 200k, you still retain your ailment effects and gain more dmg while losing a bit of crit, what do you think ?

I like my current setup because it consistently works in every situation on every hit, and It's probably more dps on everything up to guardians because of shock. For guardians and shaper i could switch crit to ele focus for max dps, but i'm just kind of lazy and don't want to have to swap another gem and bother using a pcoc setup as i'm already comfortable with my damage.

"

AngryD0rf wrote:

"

punks7yle wrote:

Even in your POB build with nothing else changed, bf > inc aoe > immolate > wed >added cold >ruthless increased the sheet dps by 200k, you still retain your ailment effects and gain more dmg while losing a bit of crit, what do you think ?

I like my current setup because it consistently works in every situation on every hit, and It's probably more dps on everything up to guardians because of shock. For guardians and shaper i could switch crit to ele focus for max dps, but i'm just kind of lazy and don't want to have to swap another gem and bother using a pcoc setup as i'm already comfortable with my damage.

Even in that setup, lighting dmg is 2x the rest (not counting immolate for the original hit) so you will always be shocking for max or almost max.

whats the best setup for 5 link ?

"

punks7yle wrote:

Even in that setup, lighting dmg is 2x the rest (not counting immolate for the original hit) so you will always be shocking for max or almost max.

Yeah, you're right about that, i forgot x2 damage from ruthless.

I took ruthless+immolate for a test run and i really didn't like how inconsistent it felt on trash. Even though boss dps was a bit higher, personally i don't think that having to worry about pcoc setup, hexproof/90% avoid of ailments and ruthless mechanics are really worth it. But overall that setup is a viable option for higher dps, so thanks for the suggestion.

"

sporter26 wrote:

whats the best setup for 5 link ?

I'd still recommend the setup I listed above, Blade Flurry - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Added Lightning Damage - Increased Critical Strikes - Added Cold Damage

Hello~ im playing your build in Harbinger.

now im lv84. curious how can i playing reflect map.

god bless you~

"

hyunwoo7730 wrote:

curious how can i playing reflect map.

Well, you shouldn't, but if you got an unlucky corruption and don't want to sell it then you can probably make it in 6 portals.

Did you tested a Setup with a Two-Handed Weapon and Kaoms Heart?

Edit myself: Im an Idiot^^ Blade Flurry cant be used with Two-Handed Weapons