[3.10] 🐉 Dragon's Breath Elementalist - Incinerate

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FrozenFlame37 wrote:

Please don't get me wrong, I really like evasion / dodge as a concept and I think it's awesome that it's a viable option.
But what I don't understand is why it is the best defensive method for this build.
I would assume that the best option is also based on the pathing on the tree that is needed to get the defensives working. So I expect evasion / dodge on Shadow, Ranger and Witch builds that are already on the right side of the tree.
You have much more experience with different builds than I do, so your reasoning interests me why you chose dodge.

On a sidenote, I think you have ~1k armour and not much more, because you didn't gear the character towards it and set the tree up for a different defensive method. That is absolutely fine.

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destroyermaker wrote:

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TorsteinTheFallen wrote:

If you remove Acrobatics nodes you can see that you will have ~1k armour instead of 500. Even with Alchemist's Granite flask of Iron Skin you'll get only to ~10k armour.
That amount is not worth building around and from my experience 15K is bare minimum to make Molten Shell viable (barely).
Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics together with Atziri's Step, Quartz flask, Flesh & Stone and Vaal Grace will give you 91% damage avoidance chance for attacks (melee or ranged) and 75% spell avoidance chance! That's a lot and beats any other defensive method for this build.

The armour is a big selling point, no? So aren't we better off using something instead of Kaom's that better plays to our strengths? It seems like a bandaid fix to subpar pathing (or just a result of Witch tree nerfs). I acknowledge I'm much less experienced; just trying to understand things. Also you've mentioned in the past you're bad at building around ES (a possibly superior route).

It's simply best defensive method for a life based caster like this because you can't get that level of defense in any other way.
It's not just gearing. Scaling armour is not an easy task. Passives are far away. Base armour is very low since you don't get any from the Ascendacy like Jugg or Champion.
It's a channeling build which means you are stationary while casting and exposed to damage so at that point dropping Dodge and going into Armour would mean that you would have to tank all damage and believe me you don't want that.
High dodge and damage avoidance provide much smoother and safer gameplay.

Energy shield variant or even hybrid can be made with block based defenses. I already made such char just didn't published it. The downside is it cost's a lot more to make and is more complicated. For most beginner players that go with this build it would be a hardship so I decided to stick with the life based Kaom's version.

Gotcha. Thank you.

After watching tarkecats video on the delirium mechanic is this build going to be any good for this? The standing still to charge up stacks seems like a bad idea if the fog is always moving.

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xbryguyx wrote:

After watching tarkecats video on the delirium mechanic is this build going to be any good for this? The standing still to charge up stacks seems like a bad idea if the fog is always moving.

Boost speed cast spell - very fast charge up stacks.

Delirium - edit build, but the build direction and armor are largely preserved

Thank you for this very fun to play and strong build. I returned to PoE a week ago after a couple of years or so and I had a blast with my Elementalist. Albeit I only got to tier 8-9 maps (lvl 86), so neither can I have an opinion on the final form of the build (which I trust is as cool as it sounds even if I never got to craft Aspect of Spider or got my hands to 6L Martyr's) nor have I ever faced Elder, Shaper etc.

Falling back to noob state after my two year absence, I intend to league start again with the build to take advantage of already having played it and avoid having to figure out stuff again from scratch. Plus I still want to play it more.

The main observation for my input for the build is the following: without the tireless cluster and with a "-3 to mana cost of non-channeling skills", only a 5% reduced mana cost is needed to get incinerate down to 1 mana according to PoB (even 2 mana feels as though my mana doesn't move with the mana regeneration my toon has thanks to the Quick recovery cluster, but I am not going to argue about that). This 5% reduction can easily be found in one of the jewels and from what I saw in the Metamorph league, you can buy a %cast speed, % life, % reduced mana reserved much cheaper than a jewel with double cast speed roll + %life.

Here is how I am going to slightly deviate from the suggested tree in my new instance of the build. I intend to drop the 6 nodes toward and including the Tireless cluster and invest the same 6 points to get the Purity of Flesh cluster.

CONS

1. One less cast speed roll on a jewel for 5% reduced mana cost(pretty negligible I think).

2. Flame Dash costs 28 mana at level 20 instead of 25 with Tireless according to PoB. Obviously I haven't tested this myself to see if it actually feels clunkier, but I want to assume it doesn't for this kind of increase in the mana cost since the unreserved mana in the final setup of the original PoB of the build was 58 mana, still more than 2 casts of Flame Dash with increased cost.

PROS

1. The obvious one, same life as Tireless but 20% more chaos resistance which is huge.

2. The decisive one, i.e. the ability to temporarily get Aspect of the Spider for the poor whenever wanted. Getting Enlightent lvl 4 for Aspect seemed so end-game for me in Metamorph that felt by far more science fiction than all the other things I had to achieve for the build (could be wrong though). In any case, by investing 3 to 5 more points into the Sovereignty cluster which is now directly accessible (most probably taking them away from the Nimbleness cluster as in the original PoB tree) we can still get Aspect by even avoiding the Enlighten support. According to PoB, 1 point into the cluster is enough to make Enlighten lvl 3 enough, 2 points to make lvl 2 enough and the whole 3 points into Sovereignty to make the gem unnecessary. Then while we level the Enlighten gem (up to lvl 4 after an eternity I guess), we can progressively respec out of the 5 nodes of the Sovereignty and invest them back into the normal nodes of the build such as Nimbleness or Heart of Flame if we are not there yet.

3. Access to the Explosive Impact cluster. The original PoB stops at lvl 94, but if you level past lvl 94 there shouldn't be many (or any) better options than this cluster to spend points afterwards. And even though I understand how important cast speed is, I would probably take it before Nimbleness if I have reached a satisfactory cast speed already, it is definitely more damage and Elemental Overload is already up all the time without the crit chance from Nimbleness.

As an unrelated very slight detail, I think it is also better to open the jewel socket above Blood Drinker in the right side of the tree compared to e.g. the one above the witch, the +10 dex on the way to it might relieve a bit our mild struggle with dexterity.

That's it! Happy League start everyone!

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GermanosKaraflas wrote:

Here is how I am going to slightly deviate from the suggested tree in my new instance of the build. I intend to drop the 6 nodes toward and including the Tireless cluster and invest the same 6 points to get the Purity of Flesh cluster.

PROS
1. The obvious one, same life as Tireless but 20% more chaos resistance which is huge.

I think, purity of flesh is good IF + Cleansed Thoughts.
Purity of flesh + armor resistance 30-40% + Cleansed Thoughts = 100% chaos resistance

BUT BETTER - 6 point in
the jewel socket above Devotion in the left side of the tree + nearby Heartseeker in the right side of the tree
Two jewel - max 26% chaos resistance (instead 20), max 14% life (instead 20), but + 2-4 suffixes (including the reduction of mana).

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GermanosKaraflas wrote:

Spoiler

Thank you for this very fun to play and strong build. I returned to PoE a week ago after a couple of years or so and I had a blast with my Elementalist. Albeit I only got to tier 8-9 maps (lvl 86), so neither can I have an opinion on the final form of the build (which I trust is as cool as it sounds even if I never got to craft Aspect of Spider or got my hands to 6L Martyr's) nor have I ever faced Elder, Shaper etc.

Falling back to noob state after my two year absence, I intend to league start again with the build to take advantage of already having played it and avoid having to figure out stuff again from scratch. Plus I still want to play it more.

The main observation for my input for the build is the following: without the tireless cluster and with a "-3 to mana cost of non-channeling skills", only a 5% reduced mana cost is needed to get incinerate down to 1 mana according to PoB (even 2 mana feels as though my mana doesn't move with the mana regeneration my toon has thanks to the Quick recovery cluster, but I am not going to argue about that). This 5% reduction can easily be found in one of the jewels and from what I saw in the Metamorph league, you can buy a %cast speed, % life, % reduced mana reserved much cheaper than a jewel with double cast speed roll + %life.

Here is how I am going to slightly deviate from the suggested tree in my new instance of the build. I intend to drop the 6 nodes toward and including the Tireless cluster and invest the same 6 points to get the Purity of Flesh cluster.

CONS

1. One less cast speed roll on a jewel for 5% reduced mana cost(pretty negligible I think).

2. Flame Dash costs 28 mana at level 20 instead of 25 with Tireless according to PoB. Obviously I haven't tested this myself to see if it actually feels clunkier, but I want to assume it doesn't for this kind of increase in the mana cost since the unreserved mana in the final setup of the original PoB of the build was 58 mana, still more than 2 casts of Flame Dash with increased cost.

PROS

1. The obvious one, same life as Tireless but 20% more chaos resistance which is huge.

2. The decisive one, i.e. the ability to temporarily get Aspect of the Spider for the poor whenever wanted. Getting Enlightent lvl 4 for Aspect seemed so end-game for me in Metamorph that felt by far more science fiction than all the other things I had to achieve for the build (could be wrong though). In any case, by investing 3 to 5 more points into the Sovereignty cluster which is now directly accessible (most probably taking them away from the Nimbleness cluster as in the original PoB tree) we can still get Aspect by even avoiding the Enlighten support. According to PoB, 1 point into the cluster is enough to make Enlighten lvl 3 enough, 2 points to make lvl 2 enough and the whole 3 points into Sovereignty to make the gem unnecessary. Then while we level the Enlighten gem (up to lvl 4 after an eternity I guess), we can progressively respec out of the 5 nodes of the Sovereignty and invest them back into the normal nodes of the build such as Nimbleness or Heart of Flame if we are not there yet.

3. Access to the Explosive Impact cluster. The original PoB stops at lvl 94, but if you level past lvl 94 there shouldn't be many (or any) better options than this cluster to spend points afterwards. And even though I understand how important cast speed is, I would probably take it before Nimbleness if I have reached a satisfactory cast speed already, it is definitely more damage and Elemental Overload is already up all the time without the crit chance from Nimbleness.

As an unrelated very slight detail, I think it is also better to open the jewel socket above Blood Drinker in the right side of the tree compared to e.g. the one above the witch, the +10 dex on the way to it might relieve a bit our mild struggle with dexterity.

That's it! Happy League start everyone!

Thank you very much for your input! :)

Purity of Flesh will be taken instead of Tireless, you are right.
Mind you that you have to have absolute mana sustain to support long channeling in things like Delve, so 2 mana cost for Incinerate is the max one and doable with -3 mana craft.

Enlighted lvl 4 is kinda mandatory to be able to use Aspect of the spider or Circle of Anguish with less mana reserved by Herald of Ash.
Investing 5 points is too much for that.

Switching from Cinderswallow Urn to Atziri's promise for more chaos res leaves you without Onslaught. Getting cast speed everywhere you can is paramount, especially if you can't get good jewels.

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xbryguyx wrote:

After watching tarkecats video on the delirium mechanic is this build going to be any good for this? The standing still to charge up stacks seems like a bad idea if the fog is always moving.

Hard to tell tbh. My guess the build will be very much challenged at A8 and high tier maps vs Delirium. We will have to see.

TorsteinTheFallen, will you update this build?

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puri_nolya wrote:

TorsteinTheFallen, will you update this build?

Yeah, just waiting PoB to get updated.