[3.11] Divine Ire Hierophant (Self cast)

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Rejz0 wrote:

Ty for answer. I have 50ex for gear. But definetly i wanna Craft weapon by myself. Ridicoulus base cost with Double roll as extra lighting/chaos Like 15-20ex. With luck under 1ex + Multi mod without 5-6 for preffix cannot be Chance Then multi mod. Thinking about shroud with full shaper but go to CI with watchers Eye clarity - mana as extra ES and invest some in max mana. Chaos immune should give decent def if can get 10k+ ES

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Rejz0 wrote:

Ty for answer. I have 50ex for gear. But definetly i wanna Craft weapon by myself. Ridicoulus base cost with Double roll as extra lighting/chaos Like 15-20ex. With luck under 1ex + Multi mod without 5-6 for preffix cannot be Chance Then multi mod. Thinking about shroud with full shaper but go to CI with watchers Eye clarity - mana as extra ES and invest some in max mana. Chaos immune should give decent def if can get 10k+ ES

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tanhongyit wrote:

May i know the reason of using blood rage?
since the attack speed and physical damage life leech does not benefit

sorry in advance for my noob poe knowledge

"

Lilyliciously wrote:

Welcome everyone to my second guide! This time around, we're taking a look at a Divine Ire Inquisitor. As with last time, this guide is being made and updated around league start. As such, there will be changes to the guide as more information becomes available. Please check the changelog section to see if there's been any relevant updates since you last checked!

I'll likely be streaming the build in the first week or three of the league, you can drop in to check it out! This league, I'm playing my build in SCSSF. This is to ensure I can bring it to end game and prove its viability. I'm still playing as if I was in HCSSF, and I'm minimizing the amount of deaths.

Please note that the claim that this is HC viable is not entirely proven yet. All the signs point to it, but more time is needed to prove it.

Changelog

07/03/2019: Changed the gems significantly. Main group, CWDT group, and herald group, are all modified.

08/03/2019: Rerouted the passive tree a bit in the pastebin.

09/03/2019: Updated PoB with proper gems, and updated guide with thoughts after playing this for almost ten hours. Also changed Vigilant strike links.

14/03/2019: Major changes to gem links, equipment goals, and our end game passives.

16/03/2019: Major changes due to the addition of an EB MoM variant. Previous variant is still fine.

17/03/2019: Changed my suggestions after testing EB. I prefer going without.

18/03/2019: Changed the passive trees in the late game for the no-EB variant. Also added quality information in the main link.

20/03/2019: Added Atziri kill video.
20/03/2019: Added some touchups here and there. Of note is an addition to the weapon section, and a section called "Deceptively useless mods" at the end of the gear section.

27/03/2019: Changed the weapon goals. Herald of Ash already covers some of the benefit that the mace would've provided. Sorry for wasting your currency!

06/06/2019: 3.7 Update. Minor tree changes, that's it. Removed the EB variant due to it being weaker.

3.7 changes

Divine Ire was untouched. Passive tree has some minor changes to it. Immortal call needs to be replaced by Steelskin for now, might think of something better later.

ALREADY FIXED IN 3.7.1: The animation changes fucked up the usability of Divine Ire. Basically, it's animation cancelling before sending out the beam a lot of times, despite the beam being instant. A lot of the ways I used it no longer work. For example, holding move, holding divine ire, and releasing divine ire no longer sends out the beam.

Please note that this guide is meant for HCSSF play. It assumes that you have no unique items, that you will not get any particular unique items, and that you intend to never die. That said, many uniques are perfectly viable or even good for the build, evaluate them on a case by case basis as they drop for you. This particular build has a goal unique we're chancing, but it is not necessary in order to play at a high level.

This build is not targeted at the best of the best players. If you casually reach 100 in every HC league, this guide is not for you. I'm a strong opponent of the idea that HCSSF is something that only highly skilled and experienced players should even attempt, and my guides are an attempt at giving people resources with which to progress in PoE.

How is Divine Ire?

I've now taken the spell through its paces a bit, into maps. So far, I'm in love. The damage is very high, and with a bit of cast speed it feels like a pistol in how it handles, and like a cannon in how it demolishes.

Generally speaking, you don't fully charge the beam for most packs. Thanks to Herald of Ash, our AoE clear around the beam is a bit extended thanks to the massive overkills we're doing. Our goal weapon improves the AoE murdering too.

The skill has a lot of potential, and I'm looking forward to pushing with it.

Who am I?

I'm Lily, a masochist at heart, thus my love for HCSSF. My proficiency over the past 1200 hours have been mixed, but I have evolved from barely getting past A5 Kitava to reliably hitting maps with about half the characters I give it a solid attempt with (rough estimation). I reached 90 in Delve and Betrayal, and intend to push even higher in Synthesis.

Do you stream?

Yes! Sort of. I'm not a professional streamer. I'm not even a hobbyist streamer. The main reason that I even set up streaming software was so that I could easily share with one or two friends what I was doing, I didn't intend to build a community.

I don't generally talk on stream. I don't have a camera. It's basically just a window into my current gameplay session, with the added benefit of me interacting in chat about what I'm doing. In this case, it'll let you see how my build is performing, because I'll be playing it nonstop for a while.

Link to my shitty stream

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General info

DISCLAIMER: WE ARE NOT PLAYING A LIGHTNING SPELL

This is something I've seen a fair bit of confusion about regarding my build. It is very important to realize that we are not playing Divine Ire as if we were playing a lightning spell. Instead, we're playing a Physical Conversion spell.

The base damage of Divine Ire is physical, not lightning. We do convert all of it to lightning, but the fact that it once was pure physical allows us to do very interesting things.

Of particular note is adding elemental and chaos damage from the physical damage. By choosing mostly generic elemental damage on the skill tree and our items, and not focusing on lightning damage specifically, we can dramatically boost our base damage by using modifiers like "Physical damage added as extra Lightning/Cold/Fire damage". Heavy use of modifiers like this is what this build is based around, and it gives us very high damage.

Proven Achievements

Act 10 Kitava on a completely fresh character in SC SSF, deathless. ~6 hours, doing all lab trials and kill point quests.

Deathless Atziri. Skip to 4:20 for the actual Atziri kill.

Using Eldritch Battery

There is no reason to use Eldritch Battery for this build. We're tankier without it, and do as much damage.

Pros and Cons

+ Tanky
+ HC Viable
+ Built for SSF
+ Good league starter
+ Good clear and boss killing all in one package
+ Breezes through uber lab, Argus included
+ Not too many buttons
+ Super satisfying sounds

- ES gear is harder to get in SSF
- Can't do Elemental Reflect maps.
- You need to aim and position yourself well for the clear to work

Playstyle

Try and forget that you're playing a channeling spell. The only time you want to reach 20 stages is when you're on a boss with an intro sequence like Izaro. In an actual bossfight, you do not want to stay still for too long. Two hits at 10 stages will do as much damage as one hit at 20. Use this to your advantage. In a fight, I often use Flame Dash after getting 5-10 stages, repositioning before dishing out another smaller beam. The rule of thumb is: 20 stages doesn't hurt, but mobility is more important.

When clearing maps, this is doubly true. Our damage is so high you don't need 20 stages to kill something. I generally run up to a pack to get in range with my zaps, charge for a fraction of a second (0.2-0.3 seconds), and then release. This tends to kill entire packs without issue. By using the fact that the beam deals damage in an area around you, it's also possible to get in the middle of a pack and send the beam off to another pack, killing two of them in one blow.

Content specific advice

Immortal Syndicate: Early content is a breeze. Ambushes die before they have time to be come a nuisance, you just need to pay attention and not let them get too many attacks off before you obliterate them. As of early 3.6, you'll know when Betrayal is in a zone you're in by the lag spikes.

Delve: Delving with Divine Ire is a lot easier than I feared. Tight quarters sounds like it would be a nuisance, but it works just fine. Our clear speed benefits immensely by tightly packed groups. In open maps without enough monster density, we'd need a beam for each tiny pack. With high density, one beam kills everything.

Temporal Incursions: The build is fast enough to easily complete the timed temporal incursions. The temple itself is also a breeze.

Path of Building

Pastebin

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Main Mechanics

Offensive

Divine Ire: As you channel, you zap nearby enemies. The area of this is affected by increased area of effect. Each time you cast, you get a stage. Hitting monsters with the zaps has a chance to give you extra stages. Rares and uniques always give extra. Releasing the channel sends out a beam. It has max width at 10 stages. It has max damage at 20 stages. The more stages you have, the more damage you do. The final beam is not affected by increased area of effect, but is affected by increased area damage. When releasing, you also deal the beam damage in a small area around you, similar to the area in which you zap. There is a negligible difference between doing two 10 stage casts and a single 20 stage cast, except for chill/shock/other effects that benefit from a large single hit.

Elemental Overload is a passive that grants a large More multiplier to elemental damage, if you've crit in the past 8 seconds. This effectively makes your crit bonus be a steady 1.4x. At early levels, we won't have the crit stats to go beyond that. We're dropping this around level 60-80 somewhere to instead invest heavily into crit.

Elemental Conversion is a strong way to scale your damage. Increases to individual damage types are applied to the final product, if that product once was that damage type. A "simple" example is below this paragraph. By converting, we can make use of both physical and elemental damage scaling. In reality, we're only going to easily reach 100% and 80% conversion respectively. It's important to note that "Gain X% of Y damage as Z damage" is also treated as conversion, with special rules. See the example below for details.

Conversion example

Stats:
100 physical damage
10% inc phys damage, 10% inc elemental damage, 10% inc lightning damage.
100% phys converted to lightning
30% of phys gained as extra lightning
30% of phys gained as extra fire

100 phys adds 30 lightning damage.
100 phys adds 30 fire damage.
100 phys becomes 100 lightning.
Base damage is now: 100+30 lightning, 30 fire.

The lightning damage is affected by increases to physical damage, elemental damage, and lightning damage.
130 * (1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1) = 169.
The fire damage is affected by increases to physical damage, elemental damage, but not lightning damage.
30 * (1 + 0.1 + 0.1) = 36

By focusing on scaling things that affect all elements, such as phys or elemental damage or spell damage, we can utilize the way that phys added as X adds base damage to our spell. This, combined with the ridiculous scaling from Divine Ire's stages, allows for very high damage.

In order of effectiveness:
Non-Chaos added as Chaos (works on every step. Phys, lightning, cold, fire, all gets affected)
Elemental added as Chaos (works on every step except phys)
Lightning added as Chaos (lightning is the most scaled portion of our damage, due to our rings and our conversion numbers)
Phys added as Lightning (same reason as above)
Lightning added as Cold/Fire (same reason as above)
Phys added as Cold/Fire (The least scaled options are the worst)

Elemental Penetration: Through Inquisitor, we gain elemental penetration when we do not crit. When we do crit, we ignore resistances. This is a very important interaction to be aware of. If we crit, resistances are treated as 0. Because of this, stacking penetration is generally not going to be worth it for us. Anything that brings an enemy's resistance below 0% will not work when we crit. As such, we don't use any exposure mechanic, and we do not go out of our way to stack penetration. Instead, we focus on increased damage, to go with our already strong resistance ignoring/penetration.

Vaal Righteous Fire: Activating Vaal RF will grant you a large more multiplier to your damage, while doing a chunk of damage to yourself. Be careful when activating this so that you can regen/leech the damage taken. This is still worth it, even after the nerf.

Defensive

This guide is written for HCSSF. What this means is that the goal is to have no deaths whatsoever. As such, rather than aim for "good enough" defenses, we kind of go a bit crazy.

Life: The more you have, the less you die. Shocking, I know.

Mind over Matter: This makes you take some damage from mana before life. You want to hit a balance of 70 life for every 30 mana. You can quickly check if you're at that by dividing health by mana. If it's 2.333, you're right on. If it's higher, you have too much life compared to mana. If it's lower, you have too little life compared to mana.

Energy Shield: This build is scaling energy shield. This is because of the abundance of ES leech in this patch, allowing us to have a decent buffer on top of our health and mana which we can leech to sustain.

Fortify: By using Vigilant Strike, we can easily achieve a high duration fortify. That means 20% reduced damage from hits. That's pretty big! An alternative to Vigilant Strike is to use shield dash with fortify.

Enfeeble: Normal and Magic monsters deal 30% less damage, 15% on rare and uniques. This is also big! Cast when damage taken won't make this up all the time, but it should help keep you alive anyway.

Block: Thanks to block, we'll have roughly 25-30% of attacks not actually deal damage. I tend to think of this as a 30% less damage taken from hits modifier.

Regeneration: Through Inquisitor, we get significant amounts of regeneration. Consecrated Ground grants 6% life regen per second, as well as 200 ES per second. This is a nerf compared to the previous version of this passive only when you are above 3333 ES. Below that value, this is a buff. We also get 15 mana per second while on consecrated ground.

Elemental Ailment Immunity: From the Inquisitor ascendancy, we get elemental ailment immunity when on consecrated ground. This is almost always active.

Immortal Call: You automatically trigger immortal call when you take damage, making you immune for a short time. This allows you to block large bursts of damage.

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Gems

Gems

Colours

Blue
Red
Green

Main Offense spell
These are all one link, but are listed in order of importance.

4L: Divine Ire - Physical to Lightning - Faster Casting/Hypothermia - Infused Channeling Support

5L: Increased Critical Strikes

6L: Concentrated Effect

Once you have at least one Call of the Brotherhood ring, as well as most of the cast speed from the passive tree, you can swap out faster casting for Hypothermia. Having two rings will be better, as you're more likely to chill bosses.

Regarding quality on gems: You want 20 quality on infused channeling, phys to lightning, Inc crit strikes, concentrated effect

Infused Channeling Support reduces the time required to get Infusion by 0.02 per quality, or 0.4. This brings it down to 0.6 seconds from 1 second. It makes the buff far more consistent for our mobility focused build.
Physical to Lightning gives 10% inc phys and lightning damage at quality 20. Phys damage scales all our damage, lightning damage scales most of our damage. Very good.
Concentrated Effect gives us 10% area damage at 20 quality. This affects all of our damage.
Increased Critical Strikes gives us 20% increased crit chance. Not huge, but not nothing.

Hypothermia gives increased chill duration, and Divine Ire gives increased Area of Effect. Neither is bad, but neither is great.

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Survivability - Please note that these gems are not all leveled to 20. The number next to the gem tells you what level I leave it at.

4L: Cast when damage taken(1) - Immortal Call(3) - Enfeeble(5)- Increased Duration(20)

The reason behind keeping these gems at this level is that cast when damage taken increases in damage taken requirements as it levels up. The higher the level, the less often the gem is triggered. It also cannot support gems that require a higher level than is listed in the gem. For a level 1 CWDT, you can't go higher than level 3 on immortal call, for example.

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DPS Assistance -
NOTE: This used to be a power charge on crit setup. That is discontinued, replaced by this setup.

4L: Holy Flame Totem - Elemental Focus - Physical to Lightning - Increased Critical Strikes

This setup is used on bosses to get a bit of extra damage. It also allows you to more easily place consecrated ground underneath the boss. If possible, you want to put this in a shaper helmet with a Hypothermia mod. This is however not required.

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Miscellaneous -

These sockets do not need to be linked.

4L: Herald of Ash - Blood Rage - Summon Chaos Golem - Vaal Righteous Fire

Herald of Ash gives us phys added as fire, as well as a 12% more multiplier to the fire portion of our damage. Blood Rage provides a constant drain to our energy shield, allowing us to benefit from anything that gives you a boost when leeching. It also provides frenzy charges. Chaos golem provides us even more physical damage reduction. Vaal Righteous Fire gives us a significant damage boost on demand.

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Movement and Arcane Surge

3L: Flame Dash - Faster Casting - Arcane Surge(6)

This spell is used to get around, and to trigger Arcane Surge. We want Arcane Surge at a level where the mana cost required to trigger it is low enough where Flame Dash triggers it in one cast.

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More defenses and/or Movement

You have two options with this link: Vigilant Strike or Shield Charge. Vigilant Strike gives you a longer fortify, and doesn't require charging into enemies, but is slower. Shield Charge doubles as fast movement, but requires that you hit and enemy in the face. Vigilant Strike requires a melee weapon, Shield Charge does not.

3L: Vigilant Strike - Ancestral Call - Faster Attacks

Vigilant Strike grants you fortify with a very long duration when you hit an enemy with it. Ancestral Call makes it easier to reliably hit an enemy without needing to be in range to kiss it. Faster attacks makes it less painful to use.

3L: Shield Charge - Fortify - Faster Attacks

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Passive Tree

Passive trees

It is very important to note that these passive trees are very much guidelines. If you don't want to use certain passives, that's fine. You do you. This is the build that I personally use.

Level 30
Level 50
Level 70
Level 90
Level 100

Ascendancy

Sanctuary - Pious Path - Righteous Providence - Inevitable Judgement

Lab1 - Normal Lab - I'd do this around level 33-35. Right after you get the crystal veins waypoint in A4 is when I tend to go for it. Sanctuary provides us access to infinite consecrated ground. This grants you health and mana regen, increased crit chance against enemies on consecrated ground, and a 10% increased damage taken by enemies on consecrated ground. Increased damage taken tends to be fairly rare, and can be treated as a more multiplier in most cases.

Lab2 - Cruel Lab - This can be done around 55-60. Pious Path grants you increased cast speed, elemental ailment immunity, ES regen, and lingering effect of consecrated ground after you leave it. This is really good, as cast speed is a massive factor that improves the playstyle of skills that build up stages like Divine Ire. The lingering effect of consecrated ground is also massive, as it means you only need to stop moving once every 4 seconds to always be affected by consecrated ground. This also means that when you kite enemies out of it, they keep the effect for 4 seconds.

Lab3 - Merciless Lab - As we use Elemental Overload while leveling, crit isn't a major concern for us. This means we can delay the third and fourth lab until we transition into crit. Righteous Providence makes you crit more often when the enemy has no elemental ailments, which is almost always true when you first fight them. You get increased crit multiplier when they're affected by some elemental ailment, which increases our damage done. All in all a great point.

Lab4 - Endless Lab - Inevitable Judgement is the reason we stack crit as much as we do, to the point of running increased critical strike support. Critical Strikes ignore enemy monster elemental resistances. This is pretty major, as it completely negates the need for penetration. Of note is that penetration is capable of making resistances negative, that does not work with this ascendancy node. When you crit with this node, the enemy resistances are considered to be 0 with nothing able to change that. This allows us to not stack penetration and do loads of damage to high resistance enemies, who are the ones we need to ensure we kill quickly anyway.

Why Inquisitor?

The templar starting area has a lot of the nodes we want early on. On top of that, the consecrated ground nodes feel great to use in all content. The crit nodes are very potent, and allow us to neglect elemental penetration from other sources.

General passive tree strategy

When levelling, it's very important to pick passives that will benefit you in the short term, while working towards the long term. If you're worried about dying, picking up a few health or block nodes will do you good. That said, the faster an enemy dies the less damage it has time to do to you, it's important to find a nice balance.

When playing SSF, I find that it's often valuable to take temporary nodes. Our use of Elemental Overload is a prime example of this. If you're struggling with resistances, picking up some resists in the tree will help you survive levelling. You get respec points from side quests, use them to help you survive to the end game. Even if you have to use some regret orbs, it is worth it to survive.

A cluster of note is the shield cluster near templar start, underneath the bottom left corner of our chosen passives. You need 6 points to reach the notable, getting 24% to all elemental resistances as well as extra block chance. This makes gearing easier, and can be respecced later when you've got good resistances on your gear.

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Pantheon

Pantheon

Major: Soul of Lunaris. All effects are lovely for survivability.

Minor: Soul of Shakari or Ralakesh.

Shakari reduces our chaos damage taken and makes us immune to poison after capturing a soul. Chaos damage is a concern, as we're using energy shield on top of our health rather than getting Chaos Inoculation for chaos immunity.

Ralakesh reduces physical damage taken over time. This is wonderful for the labyrinth, as it makes most traps do less damage. Combined with our regen, it allows us to almost ignore the traps and just run straight through.

Tukohama sounds like it would be great for a channeling build. 2% phys damage reduction per second isn't bad. Problem is, I find that we're very rarely standing still for a full second at a time.

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Gear

Gear

As this build is made with a pure SSF playstyle in mind, none of the gear in this section is mandatory. That said, there are several specific items that we want. The gear in the spoiler tags are all our best in slot goal items, they are not what you're going to use while levelling. For that, there's a section below the specific slots that tells you how to prioritize while levelling.

NOTE: The gear that is linked in each section is not strictly optimal. It might be missing shaped mods, or other things. Treat them as a guideline, with the text acting as the optimal goal. The gear is going to improve as I get better gear.

Weapon

We have three main options when it comes to weapons.

A wand/scepter/dagger with the Tacati's mod that gives spell damage and non-chaos as Chaos. You get this by having the Poison room in the Temple of Atzoatl. A level 3 room will provide a chest which will drop some base with the mod on, while having it at any level will allow the last boss to drop a rare with the mod.

A shaped Sceptre with elemental damage as extra chaos, and phys as extra lightning, is going to be quite potent. It has to be well rolled to beat a Tacati's weapon, but it's definitely going to beat it with good rolls.

A shaped Mace with extra fire and explosions is a viable choice. The explosions are less useful because we have Herald of Ash, especially in lower tier content. Overall, we can do better.

Shield

Shaper shield with % Lightning Damage as extra chaos is best. Life, crit chance, spell damage, ES, resists are all secondary to that.

Helmet

A shaper helmet with the modifier "Socketed Gems are Supported by Hypothermia" is best. You want to put your Holy Flame Totem in this link, giving you a 5L to support your damage.

It's important to remember that Hypothermia is just a nice thing to have on this helm. It's more important to have high life and ES on the helmet. If you can have life, ES, capped resists AND hypothermia, go for it. If not, focus on life, ES, and resists.

Enchant: Any Divine Ire enchant works. Damage > Beam Width > Extra zaps, I think.

Body Armour

Here you want a fairly standard Rare with Life, resists, and ES if you can get it. The crafted prefix "Gain X% of Maximum Life as Extra ES" is good here, but so is X% max life. Figure out which is best for you depending on the ratio between your life and mana.

Gloves

Fingerless silk gloves, rare, with life/resists/ES.

Any enchant, really.

Boots

Rare boots with movespeed, life, resists. If you can get this on Two-Toned Boots, it should help shore up resists so you can go for items that have less resists and more damage.

Enchant: Life and mana leech.

Amulet

An elder amulet with "Gain X% of Non-Chaos damage as extra Chaos Damage" is by far the best choice here, preferably on a dex base. It's the strongest stat we can have, due to every single part of our base damage being affected. Beyond this, you want Life, crit strike/multiplier, cast speed, spell damage.

A secondary option here is a shaper amulet with physical as extra lightning. It's not as good, but if you can't get an elder amulet it's an option.

Rings

Two Call of the Brotherhood is the best bet for this build. It makes our damage primarily cold, which helps us keep enemies chilled for hypothermia and enables freezing/shattering to help deal with porcupines and corpse explosions.

I recommend using chance orbs on the two-stone (cold and lightning) ring base. You may need to adjust your loot filter to see these. There are two possible unique results, Call of the Brotherhood and Berek's grip. Berek's Grip is a decent ring for us, but not as good as Call of the Brotherhood.

Belt

Rare belt with life, resists, and ES. You can either use a chain belt or a leather belt, depending on if you feel you need life or ES.

Using a Stygian Vise here can be good. The mods on abyss jewels aren't incredible for us though, and a regular belt is perfectly viable.

Flasks

The exact flask that has which modifier isn't important for the bleed/curse/poison immune. The important thing is to have them somewhere. We do want either Seething or Bubbling as a prefix on our life flask though, and preferably Alchemist and Adrenaline on our Quicksilver flask.

Atziri's Promise is a large boost to our damage, as well as giving us even more potent leech. If you acquire it, I'd replace the Granite Flask.

Jewels

Generic life and ES, as well as crit stats.

While leveling, the base type of items is less important. Use what gives you the best modifiers and sockets.

Base type: Energy shield. You want to use the highest energy shield bases you can find. This can be tricky early in the league, as you need to prioritize things like resistances and life. Just do your best! You do want to prioritize the shaped items over their base, so if you get a shaped helmet that isn't ES based, that's okay!

In terms of weapons, you want some sort of melee weapon. A dagger for crit, or a sceptre for elemental damage, is the way to go.

Stat priorities: Always prioritize defenses. Potential damage pales in comparison. Aim to overcap your resists by 34% to be safe from elemental weakness curses. This means you want each resist to be at 109% or more.

-Life
-Resists to cap
-Energy Shield
-Resists to overcap
-Crit, both chance and multiplier
-Generic damage
-Cast Speed

Divine Ire is affected by several damage types. Note that increased physical damage on a weapon applies locally, and does not affect Divine Ire. Global physical damage, or physical damage on something that doesn't have physical damage locally on itself, does work. Lightning damage is great. Increased Cold damage is only 80% effective, and even then that's only if we have our goal uniques. Increased Fire damage is not recommended, but not useless. Spell damage and area damage work great. Increased Area of Effect does not affect the beam, but does affect the sparks to nearby enemies.

Deceptively useless mods

There are multiple mods on our gear that seems like they should be useful, but do nothing for us. This is an incomplete collection of them. These mods do not do anything for us, and should not be considered useful.

The reason for the majority of this is simple: If a modifier can apply locally, it will.

Increased Physical Damage (on a weapon): This applies locally. Only damage dealt with the weapon will be affected, spells will not.

Increased Critical Strikes/Multiplier (on a weapon (without the words "Global" or "for Spells")): Same reason as above.

Increased elemental damage with attacks: Divine Ire is a spell. It is not an attack.

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Bandits

General answer: Alira.

Alira is a great choice early on, up to the very end game. You can respec this at a later point by selling 20 orbs of regret and an onyx amulet to get the Kill All reward, and a lapis amulet to get Alira's reward. Alira is the default choice, and then we respec if we desperately want the points later.

Alira gives us resists, crit multiplier, and mana regen. The mana regen is less useful due to us gettin 15/s from our ascendancy. The resists become less useful as we get really good gear. The crit multiplier will always be good, but 15% crit multi may or may not be worth 2 passive points.

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Leveling

Leveling

Path of Leveling

Please note that I haven't tested this leveling build. If there's errors or weird stuff going on, please let me know.

Also note that this pastebin is NOT related to Path of Building. Instead, it's used in Path of Leveling, a different tool entirely to help you level faster and remember when to get/replace gems.

Path of Leveling Pastebin

You have several options on how to level. My preferred way is in the Path of Leveling build above, using Purifying Flame/Wave of Conviction + Holy Flame Totem to Divine Ire.

If you want to stick to the Holy archetype, use Purifying Flame from the start. You can switch to Wave of Conviction after killing Fidelitas in Act 2. Finally, after killing Gravicius in Act 3, you can use Divine Ire. It's fully viable from level 28, so there's no need to wait.

Another option for low levels is using Smite + Ancestral Call. This is especially useful if you have some melee uniques to carry you through the first 28 levels.

At level 12, you're able to switch to Arc+Storm Brand, which is a powerful combo even after the nerfs.

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FAQ

What if I want to play SC?: Then play SC. This build is perfectly SC viable. It's viable for trade league as well. The build contains multiple goal items to aim for, that you can trade for. It's not as convenient as having uniques, but the gear section says what mods to look for.

Are staffs viable?: Yes! You'd need to reroute the passive tree some to remove the shield nodes and instead go for staff nodes, but it's fully viable. There are some interesting unique staffs that are very nice, such as Duskdawn or Disintegrator. That said, I prefer the shield build.

Does Concentrated Effect work? The tooltip isn't changing!: Yes. The tooltip is showing you the DPS of the little zaps that help you build stages. They are not Area Damage. The beam is area damage. Zaps: Area of effect (range) yes, area damage no. Beam: Area of effect no, area damage yes. If you face the same problem in PoB, change the dropdown from Channelling to one of the stages. If you still don't believe me, this is a link to a GGG developer confirming it.

How should I upgrade my build?: Have a cheat sheet!

Upgrade priorities

1: Make sure you have as high life as you can get, with 30 mana for every 70 life.

2: Make sure your resists are at least 75% in each elemental resistance. Chaos resist as high as you can manage is also beneficial, but harder to achieve.

3: ES gear. Get as high ES as you can get without sacrificing significant life or resists.

4: Level 21 Divine Ire. Use a Vaal Orb on a level 20 gem to have a chance to make it level 21. I recommend leveling gems in your weapon swap to do this on, as you can also reduce the level of the gem.

5: Two Call of the Brotherhood rings. Not only do these improve our damage, they also allow us to chill, freeze, and shatter. This is an immensely powerful survivability tool, as it lets us completely ignore corpse explosions and porcupines.

6: Atziri's Promise will help your damage a lot, as well as get you more life leech.

7: A good weapon. See the gear section for our options. A good spell damage Tacati's or a shaped Scepter will work best.

8: Elder Amulet with "Gain X% of Non-Chaos damage as extra Chaos damage". Another huge boost.

9: Get quality on your gems. Farming Uber Lab is a good way to get gemcutter's prisms, through selling quality gems to a vendor. Priority on this can be found up in the gems section.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it should get you going.