Titan - League Starter/SSF - Beginner Friendly - Fire Build to get to Endgame
 ------------------------------------------ MaxRoll Link: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/tqf5301q I really don't like the way MaxRoll has their Planner set up as it doesn't give a great opprotunity to show specific steps of the build. I do however, like it's ease of use for showing off armor stats and skill set-up. Please take a look there if you have questions on those things. ------------------------------------------ Near End Game Example of the build (Act 3 Cruel)  ------------------------------------------ 1. Introduction 2. Pros/Cons 3. How to play it 5. Ascendancy 4. Passive Skill Tree 6. Gear & Stats to look for 7. Act Walkthroughs 8. Problematic Enemies 9. Theorycrafting 10. Closing ------------------------------------------ 1. Introduction Hello there, if you are reading this, than you, like me, have been on the hunt for a decent guide to use on Warrior that won't get you stuck in Endgame. I wanted to preface this guide by letting you know it's my first crack at a write-up. I've been playing PoE for about 9 years now with ~3000 hours into it and I'm very passionate about the game and community, so I'm truly hoping this helps people out, at least a bit. I won't be able to respond here a ton, as I am a working Dad - so please be patient with me if you have questions or suggestions. As with everything in PoE2, the game is super new and things are changing constantly, so what might be viable today, might change tomorrow. I will try my best to keep things up to date here. An important note here is I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible for new players, utilizing only three spells so you don't get overwhelmed. While I absolutely love the PoE community and how it constantly strives to obliterate the game by making insane builds, these are usually extremely daunting and confusing to players. I'm hoping this guide can serve as a jumping off point for players to learn the core concepts. If you ever have questions, please ask in the forum here or stop by my Twitch channel, I stream pretty often and would be happy to answer things live. I play typically on Standard league, to provide help for my friends, but if I'm testing out builds - it will be strictly self-imposed SSF. With all that out of the way, I've found this build to be super consistent and fun, with an emphasis on "hit it hard, hit it once" gameplay, that I couldn't quite get while using super slam or some of the other higher level skills. This build heavily focuses on Molten Blast, Perfect Strike and Infernal Cry, with some optional next-level strategies. ------------------------------------------ 2. Pros/Cons Pros +++ Straightforward - can focus on learning fights instead of class abilities +++ Easy to Gear - no Uniques that are absolutely required +++ Room to Expand and add your own flare +++ Boss Damage Cons --- Straightforward - could be boring if 2-3 buttons isn't enough for you --- Risk vs Reward - Perfect Strike can take time to get used to --- Almost purely fire damage can cause trouble down the line --- Slow attack speed isn't for everyone ------------------------------------------ 3. How to play it I wanted to keep things as simple as possible for this build for new players to get through content and enjoy the game. There is plenty of room for more veteran players to pick this up and experiment/push the boundaries of this as well - more on that in theorycrafting sections. Important Note: This build comes online at level 14, until then just use Rolling Slam and Boneshatter, I'll go over that in more detail in the Walkthrough section. These are the main skills you will be using for this build. I. Molten Blast
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This is your pack clearing ability. The initial larger projectile will explode on impact, dealing a big chunk of fire damage to enemies and shrapnel will be created behind the target that does pure fire damage afterward. The shrapnel is basically a shotgun affect and can hit mobs multiple times. Paired up with Infernal Cry, this does some really nice damage to a large area.
Support Gems: Concentrated Effect is the only required support for the 40% damage boost. Fire Infusion, Fire Penetration, Primal Armament are all great as well. If you would like, you can also experiment with projectile supports - but I generally had better luck stacking damage.  Advanced Tech: You can animation cancel by dodging as soon as the projectile has spawned. If you don't do this, your character will be locked in the "end" animation of the ability for a noticeable amount of time. Us this to your advantage for dangerous packs and bosses. II. Perfect Strike
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This skill is a monster. It does upwards of 700% attack damage on a perfect strike and will absolutely melt bosses that are in between attack phases or stunned. The big deal with this skill is that you need to time your strikes within the "perfect" window when your character glows slightly to get this to work properly. Getting stunned or missing the timing can be devastating, but the risk/reward is well worth it.
You'll primarily just be using this on Bosses and Rare monster packs. Support Gems: Windows of Opportunity is the only required support. Fire Infusion, Heavy Swing, Fire Penetration, Primal Armament, Close Combat are all great.  III. Infernal Cry
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This is your damage rider. We primarily just use this to hit a boss for big damage with Perfect Strike. The explosion on death is nice, but the main reason you use this is for the 25%-100% boost to damage.
 Thank you to ExaltedExile#8298 for the correction on it not affecting Molten Blast. ------------------------------------------ 4. Ascendancy We take Titan here. The reason being the Hulking Form notable they get which boosts a lot of our damage and defenses quite significantly. With this allocated, all notable passives in the tree will get a 50% boost. I. Ascension 1
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If you are strapped for cash, take Colossal Capacity. Even though it's pretty dang lackluster, we need it for the really good node behind it.
Otherwise, if you have the money to respec once you get through your chaos trials, take Mysterious Lineage first, as it will provide a really nice boost to you defenses in the form of a 15% Life increase.  II. Ascension 2
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Here you put your points or respec into Hulking Form as mentioned in the first Ascension details.
 III. Ascension 3 & 4
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This completely depends on the defenses you have at the time. If you are missing Physical damage reduction, take Stone Skin, otherwise get the 15% life boost from Mysterious Lineage.
------------------------------------------ 5. End Game Passive Skill Tree  ------------------------------------------ 6. Gear and what to look for This one is pretty easy. I. Body Armour & Helmet Anything that has Life, Strength & Resists is perfect. Stay focused on gear that is primarily Armour base stat - we don't use Evasion or Energy Shield. II. Boots Same as above but Movement Speed is the primary stat we are looking for. III. Gloves Same as Body Armour, but if we get a good roll with a "adds # damage to attacks." that is a very sweet bonus. IV. Rings Resist Rings (Ruby, Topaz and/or Sapphire) here to balance your resistances to as close to 75% as possible. Otherwise, same stats as Body Armour. V. Neck Strength Amulet is great, especially if it rolls Life, Resist and additional Strength. VI. Two-Handed Weapon You'll be focusing on mace... because there are no axes in the game yet. You want something that boosts Fire or Physical damage as much as possible. Added physical/fire damage or % Increase to physical/fire damage are huge. ------------------------------------------ 7. Act Walkthroughs Note: I won't be going through a general guide here to get through the campaign and end game, I'm sure there are guides out there that would do a better job than I would, this is just generally where the build should be at each point in the game. I. Act 1
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Up until level 14, you'll just be focusing on using Boneshatter and Rolling Slam. Gem supports in these skills with the same supports I mention above, and you'll be doing fine. Find a 2-Handed Mace that has a high Physical damage range and just go to town on enemies. These skills are really strong in the beginning of the game with a solid weapon.
Make sure you focus on boosting your life, armor and resists as much as possible, with a heavier focus on cold resist for the time being. You'll want to even your resist out to cover every element as soon as you hit Act 2. Keep checking the stores when you level up to snag any good resist rings and weapons here. 10 Skill Points
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We pick up fire nodes here even though we don't exclusively deal fire damage yet, which feels bad, but will get better once we level up some.
 22 Skill Points
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Towards the end of middle of Act 1, you should be good to fully switch over to Molten Blast and Perfect Strike to take advantage of the fire nodes you'll be picking up in the passive tree above.
 At this point, you should be good to move onto Act 2. II. Act 2
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At this point you should be really blasting through packs and bosses with the your skills. If you are having trouble, keep a look out for a solid 2-handed mace, even a level appropriate white can be crafted up to be something really amazing with some luck.
32 Skill Points
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The big boost here is getting Resolute Techniques. It's important to note that this build is not a critical strike build at all, so it just makes sense to eliminate any need for accuracy at all.
 43 Skill Points
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Things are starting to hit us pretty hard at this point. Time to focus on some Armor nodes to help reduce Physical damage that we take.
 At this point, you should be hitting your Ascendancy trials for the first time - check out the Ascendancy section for information on that. That should wrap up Act 2 pretty handily with you rolling into Act 3 with mostly rares and hopefully if you are lucky, 50-60% Resistances and Physical Reductions III. Act 3
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Things in Act 3 do a ton of chaos damage, there aren't a ton of things that help with that that are easily obtainable, so this act tends to be very burst and 1-shot heavy. The best you can do here is keep your resists as high as possible while boosting your damage to the point where you one-shot the mobs before they do so to you.
53 Skill Points
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The thing to note for this update is the Split the Earth notable, this gives your Strike skills a 10% chance to cause an aftershock for the same amount of damage as the initial strike. This essentially gives Perfect Strike a 10% chance to do double damage, which, when it procs, is pretty insane.
You'll also pick up 5% Strength bonuses which translate directly to more Life.  64 Skill Points
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Things still hit really hard so we pick up more resistances and physical damage reduction to help against that. A good note here is that this update specifically makes you take less physical damage from projectiles, which is really nice for a 50/50 melee range class.
 74 Skill Points
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You should be ready or have already done your ascendancy at this point for the extra two ascendancy points. This is going to be your major damage and defensive spike due to Hulking Form.
We also pick up a ton of Attack nodes which massively boost our damage.  IV. End Game
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Now you'll be getting into end game so we will start focusing more on what makes this build strong. This is also a great time to spread out and try things out for yourself and make some unique edits. I'll get into some ideas for that in my theorycrafting section.
83 Skill Points
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This is more of the same with more of a specific focus on Perfect strike really shining as a rare and boss killer, but also boosting our damage overall.
 94 Skill Points
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We pick up some really nice strength nodes here followed by additional fire penetration to take down the more annoying bosses/rares.
 103 Skill Points
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To be honest, this route is going to be pretty boring until you get into the Physical damage nodes. It's required to get the massive nodes for Two-Handed weapons.
 112 Skill Points
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Now we get the really nice two-handed nodes. These are super useful and spike out damage quite a bit. A big payoff for needing to go down that long highway to get here.
 Final Tree
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All of that strength we have been building up, let's just get a ton more and then boost our damage by a % of how much strength we have. At this point, we are going to have a ridiculous amount of strength, so this could be a 50% - 100% boost depending on where you're at with the character.
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-Filthy Crones - Stay away from then. They will constantly try to rush you down and spam their chaos shotgun puke on you. This is usually a 1-shot if they land all hits.
-Mighty Silverfist Boss - His two hand overhead smash will 1-shot us most of the time. We attack slow as well, so getting out of the way can be rough. -Chaotic Zealots - These guys hit very hard, crit often and poison. Try to keep distance a bit, dodge and hit them with a Molten Blast when you have an opening. -Viper Napuatzi Boss - She is actually mostly fine. The problem is when she gets her guards to do the Chaos Spear Wave, it is very hard to dodge and hits us multiple times, often resulting in a 1-shot. This is probably the hardest boss in the game for us, just because of this one attack. ------------------------------------------ 9. Theorycrafting I'll go over some of my ideas for alternatives for the build or how to make it just generally better while adding some complexity to it. Please feel free to also hit me up with your own suggestions or if I overlooked something here. I. Weapon Swapping
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I'm currently playing with the idea of swapping to a crossbow for Oil Shot to apply fire exposure, a slow down and great ignite damage. I generally think this will make the build more fun and versatile, but I realize it isn't for everyone.
We'll also need to balance out Dexterity pretty heavily at the cost of a lot of Health most likely, so it might require a big shake up in the passive skill tree.  II. Flammability
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Just having this one curse would help our damage out a ton. I hate hard casting curses, so I would probably add this as a Blasphemy aura just so it's always active. We'll have to balance out Intelligence with Strength here which isn't too bad, considering the recovery Intelligence gets us.
 III. Flame Wall
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Definitely interesting use here with Molten Blast. I don't use mouse and keyboard half the time though and auto-targeting is just frankly bad with a controller on this skill. The thought here is you put down a flame wall and lob a Molten Blast through it, adding a ton of fire damage and additional ignite to it, boosting damage. I'm hard pressed to use it though, because the skill feels clunky to me and we would need to invest additional intelligence for it.
 IV. Giant's Blood
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This would allow us to wield two two-handed weapons at the same time while boosting requirements to wield them by three times. Considering the amount of strength we will have late game, I don't think this will be a problem, but it will for sure hamper us in early and mid game. The other thing is that the current skill tree is already right next to Giant's Blood, making this an easy addition.
In addition to all that Molten Blast gets a boost from using two-weapons in the form of twice as many projectiles for a 30% attack speed hit. Definitely something to test out.  V. Avatar of Fire
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A good call out from iQuickbounce#1339.
I have experimented with this a bit while leveling, but it has always come up as a net-loss in DPS. From a gearing perspective, I'm sure this could work out to benefit the build but I need to figure out how to slot that in for the future. Again, this would add complexities to the build for most likely a small scale bonus, so I want to keep this out of the main suggestions up top.  VI. Auras
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Originally asked by Nakkiapina#1259. I wanted to include it here in case folks were looking for it. I haven't fully tested this out yet and Auras don't really come online for us in any meaningful way until ~level 40, so I wanted to keep it out of the main guide for the time being.
The Good -Time of Need for the big defensive boost, this is really great mid and endgame and doesn't fall off at really any point in the game that I've seen. -Attrition you do more damage the longer you are fighting a hard enemy and you cull them. Pretty much an instant add -Blasphemy + Flammability the spirit and intelligence investment cost here are pretty high for us (60 baseline, 100+ Int), but this aura will cut down monster's fire Resistances dramatically, it's really great if you can use it. The Okay -Overwhelming Presence Perfect Strike auto ignites, so it's not necessary for that bit, but the extra stun could be helpful if you take the build in that direction. Damage on Heavy Stun is pretty strong. -Berserk this is an amazing buff, but we don't take Rage nodes. If you made a variant of this with Rage, this would be a must have. -Scavenged Plating this buff is good if you armor break a lot. We are almost pure Fire damage, so we don't need to worry much about physical reductions. The Untested -Cast on Ignite this recently got nerfed, but I can still see a world where this is really strong. Perfect Strike always ignites on perfect timing so it could be a really strong addition to our arsenal. The Traps -Herald of Fire is just not very good. The overkill damage could be nice for some packs, but typically your are going to be one-shotting everything anyway if the overkill damage is enough to make any sort of impact. The VFX are nice at least! -Wind Dancer is a great defensive tool for Evasion users, we don't use Evasion so 20+% of nothing, is still nothing. VII. Hammer of the Gods
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This attack is just fun. It does a boatload of damage and looks awesome. You can use this as a stand in for Perfect Strike from time to time if you wanted to switch things up, but it's definitely not required.
------------------------------------------ 10. Closing Update: Finished this build up to maps and it was very smooth. Only one or two hiccups getting past the Viper boss. At this point, I'm considering this build and guide done. I'll still be answering questions from folks as they come in. If this helps out even one person, I'll feel like it was worth it. Heck, I'll even consider doing a few others for builds I'm currently working on. Thanks for reading, see you later exiles! Last edited by Kobyjoe#5354 on Dec 21, 2024, 10:00:33 AM Last bumped on Dec 22, 2024, 7:14:18 PM
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Reserved
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Looks cool i'll try it ty for build
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Why dont you take avatar of fire for this build?
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Swapping from a witch bonestorm build I wasn't enjoying, and this is right up my alley. Thanks for posting, interested to see how you make changes to it!
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" A very good question that I should put into the Theorycrafting portion. Throughout leveling the game has projected Avatar being a net loss of DPS. I also would lose out on some status ailments that my core build uses right now. Overall, I wanted to keep this build simple for new players and Avatar would make things a bit more complex from the gearing perspective. |
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how does infernal cry buff molten blast it says it empowers the next melee attack which molten blast isnt and same with controlled destruction on it the dps number dosent change with it equiped
Last edited by ExaltedExile#8298 on Dec 13, 2024, 5:12:35 PM
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" Great catch on both accounts. Concentrated Effect is what needs to be added here not Controlled Destruction, I'm not sure why I got those mixed up. Infernal Cry was just a miss on my part and needs to be fixed. Thanks a ton for calling that out. |
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I've been using the same-ish build and just got to maps, but a lot of my time leveling has been messing around with the build and theory crafting things / deep diving into the tree. I made my build on my own and we have a lot of similarities.
The only difference between ours is I run giants blood and a massive amount of attack speed. I can't stand how slow we attack. So I venture off and take a lot of strength / attack speed / skill speed nodes to supplement that. I also think it's worth mentioning that you can pretty much 2-3x your damage on bosses / big elites by keeping your distance. Anything point blank range will cause only 1-2 of your projectiles to hit, and the rest will go through them. A good way to circumvent this on a lot of bosses / mobs is using the terrain to body block yourself. With giant's blood and 2x 2h, we get our attack speed back from the penalty of dual wielding but also get 6 projectiles. Infernal Cry isn't bad and I was using it during the early leveling, but only for the mob explosion. Late game it's not really helpful, even when putting corrupting blood on it. Hammer of the Gods is a pretty much must have. Especially when you should be taking % more damage to heavy stunned mobs. You can do 30-50% of most bosses HP when they're stunned by just dropping it. It also doesn't require us to deviate or pick up anything extra. Been thinking about trying to get 60 int on gear to incorporate a cast on ignite to help with the speed of clearing. Gotta go fast. I'll keep checking back here. |
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" Really nice write up! Glad someone else is having fun with Molten Blast. I can definitely see the benefits of Attack Speed here and have also been thinking about how that would affect things, good to hear that it's also a really viable option. I personally enjoy the slow, big damage hits (I played a lot of Heavy Strike in PoE1). Using Hammer of the Gods as an execute would definitely add a lot here with damage on stun as well, that sounds like a really fun and useful combo. Infernal Cry is basically just to keep Perfect Strikes doing as much damage as possible in between dodging boss attacks and what-not, not a huge use for packs or mapping outside of killing annoying rares. Really appreciate the extra insight with your variation here, good stuff! Last edited by Kobyjoe#5354 on Dec 13, 2024, 9:51:06 PM
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