[Build of the Week] Brick Oven Acolyte (Acolyte of Chayula + Dual Maces)

Hello. This is a build I've personally been working on with a lot of possible options since the start of 0.3.

Acolyte of Chayula + Dual Wield Mace

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The idea is simple... What if we took the life leech of Acolytes Sap of Nightmares notable and tried taking it to its full potential?

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Let's start with scaling damage, the best way is through dual wielding maces, or using a mace and sceptre combo (more on that in the uniques section).

Taking any form of "increased attack damage", "increased physical damage", and "increased chaos damage" is highly recommended, but especially early game, you'll want to use the "gain #% physical damage as extra chaos damage" nodes between the monk/sorc section of the skill tree.
(though this is probably not the best early game build...)

For your defensive layer, evasion/energy shield is of the utmost importance, for one specific interaction with the uniques, where your energy shield acts as a second life layer.

Anything else you may want is up to you, though I would recommend critical hit chance, since you can gain volatility, which further increases your DPS by granting you "extra damage as chaos damage" thanks to Acolytes Inner Turmoil notable.

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Your skills are up to you, but I personally use Brick Oven Totems (named to honor the famous "Pizza Totem" build of PoE1 that nabbed me a few Uber kills).

The combination is Forge Hammmer >> Infernal Cry >> Shockwave Totems, adding some extra damage with your basic mace strikes, and, for big bursts of damage, boneshatter.

For support gems, Life Leech III on everything, that overcapped life leech is huge, you'll also want to use things like Rapid Attacks II and such to maximize your attack speed, granting more leech per second.

Brick Oven Totems boast a high attack rate with the ability to leech a lot of life, combined with Font of Blood Support for the Shockwave Totems, you have excellent leech options... If you're dealing chaos damage...

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So let's bring up the uniques.

An absolute necessity is Original Sin, converting 100% of elemental damage to chaos damage, you can probably see how this can be rather crazy for the Acolyte who leeches life from both chaos and physical damage. But this does mean it is NOT a cheap build to start! (It currently runs for about 60 exalted)

After that, Carnage Heart is a really good amulet, "100% increased amount of life leech", and also pairs really well with Soul Tether, which grants "Excess Life Recovery from Leech is applied to Energy Shield" but "You lose 5% of maximum energy shield per second".

And the final theoretical item (I'm poor) is the sceptre, Palm of the Dreamer, granting a ton of benefits such as "Gain 27% of damage as extra chaos damage" and "grants the effect of Dreaming Gloom Shrine" (which explodes enemies killed by chaos damage, dealing a quarter of their max health in an area). All for the low price of 50 divines!

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There's a lot of room to play around with options for support gems, ascendency points, and more. The main point of the build is to be tanky through maximizing life leech, I have yet to make it into endgame on account of making even more off-meta builds such as a Permafrost Chronomancer and Elementalist Gemling, a YouTube video on 0.3, and just in general having a blast with the game!