[2.4] How to smash Heads. Extremely detailed guide about the Facebreaker gloves and builds!

First about the life leech. Blood rage provides all of the needed life leech you will never need more.
Well the differences between the claw nodes idea and my standart 113 tree ( here it is with the extra 3 points to match the 113 of the claw tree) are as follows :

Claw tree:
+37% increased attack speed
+127% increased physical damage
+1.2% life leech

Non-claw tree
+23% block chance
+375% shield defenses
+36% armour
+6% evasion
+18% maximum life
+1.8% life regeneration
+13% all ele res

On top of that from the amulet:
huge amount of flat physical damage
life
resistances

To sum it up, because of the loss of the second biggest damage contributor after abyssus - the rare amulet, you won't increase your damage by as much as think and want ( though you don't really need anything above 50k cyclone dps without flasks. ). But you will pretty much loose half of your armour making the other half very inefficient, you will loose around 500 life, 1.8% life regen, and by locking yet another item slot with a unique that gives no resistances you'll make capping them even more of a problem, and cutting some res from the tree itself won't help you with that for sure.

Now to explain about Berserking i'll have to explain why sacrificing defenses for damage nodes in this case is not a good idea. That's something that i've talked abut many times in many threads and conversations. First of all yes we play an aRPG so that pretty much means that we like to see how the numbers we have are growing bigger and bigger, that's the beauty of the sub-genre, that's what is addictive about it - "Oh yeah! I've gained another level!" or "Awesome! I've increased my dps by 4000!!!" . We are all obsessed with bigger numbers ( though they can be deceiving... 450 physical damage vs 500 fire damage .. many will say that the 500 fire damage is better just because the number is greater ... but yeah ... i won't discuss that now ) that's all cool and i perfectly understand it, but one must ask him/herself "Is there a point when increasing my damage doesn't help me as much? At all? Do i want to increase it because that is the best way to spend my resources or do i want to increase it for the sake of the bigger numbers that i'll see?"
So is there a point when there is no point to increase your dps further - absolutely! I'll give you a simple example : If all monsters in a game have 100 hit points would there be a difference if you have 100 damage, 2000 damage or 6000000 damage? The answer of course is no, because past the threshold of 100 damage you'l always kill them with 1 hit. So in that case 100 = 101 to infinity and every resource you spend to get anything above 100 is completely and utterly wasted. Of course in PoE it is a bit more difficult but the core principle is still valid here. If you deal enough damage to kill everything except bosses for less than 1 second then it's really not worth it to spend more efforts in increasing your damage. But what about the bosses?! you would ask, well if you can kill everything else for less than a second then that means that you'll probably kill a boss for around 5 second ( this may vary based on the boss, map mods etc. ) even if you double your current damage at that point you won't reduce that time significantly .. maybe you'll kill him for 4 seconds.. but hey let's say that you'll even kill him for 3 seconds ! Now think about how much time it takes you to clear a map on average - 5 mins? 10 mins? 15? Well if you can kill the boss faster it will decrease that time and it will take you 4 mins and 58 secs; 9 mins and 58 secs; 14 mins and 58 secs ! Not that big of an improvement when you look at it now huh? So what you really need is to find that sweet spot of damage dealt and stop right there because further investments are not worth wasting resources on. Not to mention that GGG have placed an awesome mechanic to prevent you from getting too much damage ... a mechanic that was butchered lately for which i'm extremely disappointed - that mechanic is called damage reflection ... but that's a talk for another time.
But now let's talk about the defenses. Is there a point where you hit that optimal defensive values just like there is one for your offences ? Well... theoretically yes ... but in reality you can never reach that point in PoE. You can never become immortal, completely indestructible in every situation. So that means that no matter how much effort you throw at improving your defenses it will be worth it. Not to mention that mechanically PoE encourages defense stacking - just look at armour and the way it works ! And while we talk about defenses i must also touch the subject of death in PoE. Unless you play HC death doesn't seem like a big deal when you are in your 70s or 80s. 10% exp big deal you'll grind for half an our and you'll make up for it right? Ok but what about when you are in your early 90s? Mid 90s? At level 99 ? Suddenly the possibility of dying becomes unthinkable. 10% exp means loosing the progress that you've work for for hours, sometimes days, even weeks of gameplay. On top of that it costs you tons of currency ... all those maps that you've cleared for these 10% exp, all the currency that went into rolling those maps .. maybe you've even bought some of them. And now the result of all that is gone ... just like that!
So in the end stacking damage beyond the optimal amount of dps will save you minutes while stacking defenses will save you days. All you need to do is to reach the sweet spot of damage and then throw everything on your defenses.

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eugenez wrote:

For a rare shield, you would want something with life, high armour, some res, block % and a blank slot to craft PDPS. If not, Lioneye's Remorse will be superior.

Yup ... that's the answer ^^ Though i would probably skip the physical for an armour mod ...
The perfect shield for me would look like this :


Pinnacle Tower Shield
Armour : 2127 (406 base )
Block Chance: 31% (25% base )
---------------------------------
+99 to maximum life
+400 to armour
120% increased armour
30% chaos resistance
16% all elemental resists
6% additional block chance

When your league character ( in this case your talisman character ) gets transferred ti standard all of the gear goes with him/her including league only items ( like talismans )

Well i must admit that i rarely trade and i can't say what to expect to pay for a good rare ring or boots with 100% accuracy ( though i'll try ) but what i can say is what to look for.
First of all buy the boots - search for boots with 30% movement speed at least 75 life and two resits with at least 35%, make sure that you can craft the third type of resist on them, do so and you'll have pretty good boots to run around with. After a quick poe.trade search those go for 10-30c.
After you get the boots unequip your rings and amulet and see what total amount of resists you need to get to cap your resistances. Search for rings with the mod "Adds #-# Physical Damage to Attacks" and in the min put the number "10" , also look for rings with at least 65 life, do the same for the amulet but for the physical damage mod type "20". Now with just these 2 mods these items are very cheap ... up to 1 chaos orb, but of course the price will go up when you add resists into the equation. Don't look for triple res rings and amulet ... those are expensive, hell even rings with 1 good rolled res and an implicit res mod could be enough when you master craft a second res on them. Do the math before you buy any rings or amulet though.
I'm not sure if this post helps ... but hey ... i've tried :)