(Build of the Week) - 0.3 Armoured Grenade Chronomancer

Build Overview

Substantial %max life heal for every grenade fired using Grenade skills with Second Wind III and Payload.

Powerful temporal chains + Chronomancer slow aura prevents the build from being overwhelmed and plays well with the delayed detonation of grenade skills.

Reload all grenades every 15 seconds with the Time Snap Ascendency using a cooldown recovery weapon swap with Crest of the Ardura.

Full t14 gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFcqhFCZDCc

Build: https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/Shadez-7094/character/Vanciann

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Pros
- Budget friendly t15 mapper using cheap uniques and rares
- Infinite grenades is fun
- Slow Aura makes kiting very forgiving even with enormous packs
- Stun utility in panic situations with Stun Grenades which stun enemies and heal you
- High tri-elemental damage through elemental weakness

Cons
- Time Snap requires a manual swap or spellcast before refreshing
- Framerate drops with cluster grenade spam
- Life + Armour only makes it fragile to one-shots. Needs more defensive layers
- Set and forget grenade playstyle means you sometimes have to double back for loot
- Requires ammo management and finding pauses in gameplay to Time Snap and reload

Important interactions

Swapping to Crest of Ardura and weapon set with high Cool Down Recovery allocated does snapshot the cooldown of Time Snap.

Adding cooldown to grenades through Payload and Second Wind gives health for the adjusted cooldown, meaning each click can heal for 40-60% of max health.

Grenades scale well with +levels, so the Fireflower unique is a substantial damage increase. It also enables us to use Ngamahu's Chosen to generate max rage even though we are not a melee build which we upkeep by taking a few nodes for rage duration.

Constant self healing lets us use Blood Magic, requiring no other investment into mana sustain and allowing the use of Ambrosia on Cluster Grenades to turn our mana flasks into massive damage.

Anointing +1 grenade cooldown use on amulet does get doubled by Second Wind. This is also pushed further by the Chronomancer Ascendency for 33% chance to not use a cooldown, enabling Cluster Grenade spam.

Reducing debuff duration by 65% is a nice QoL improvement for any DoTs or Curses we get hit by.

Final Thoughts

This is the first build I've gotten to lvl 90+ and found fun enough to grind T15 maps with so I wanted to share it. I was impressed by the performance without much investment, and I think with more thought and optimization the build concept could go much further. With more spirit there's room to fit Trinity, Berserk, or Enfeeble and there are probably other defensive layers I haven't considered.

If anyone picks up the build and decides to make changes please let me know! I'd be very curious to see how it evolves.

My mortar tactician has died, so this looks like an interesting substitute, definitelly will try!