Good Morning Folks! Given that I have mostly polished the rough edges off my Minion Guardian, this means I have once again turned my attention to Storm Brand Inquisitor. The why of this build is I wanted to give Storm Brand Inquisitor a bit of a redemption arc, or at least a chance at one. I had played this build in Kalandra League and struggled with it quite a bit. In the last league, I spent some time sifting through my old characters and re-evaluating them with my current level of knowledge and that poor Storm Brand Character was a mess. Essentially I had nothing vaguely resembling proper defensive layers and had nowhere close to capped resistances. At a minimum, I could at least solve that last problem with the build. As a result, I have had this build in the back of my head as something I wanted to revisit, and almost did last league but instead decided to make my “brand build” of the league Wintertide.
Once again I started with Velyna’s guide as a template and then tweaked that a bit to suit my tastes. Namely, I dropped the dual wield nodes and pathed down to pick up shield nodes. I question if this was a good decision because honestly… so far I have not really been able to get enough block chance to make that a viable defensive layer. More than anything I wanted to be able to use shield charge, which requires a shield. So far… the build feels sorta mid. That isn’t necessarily bad, but compared to my other options it doesn’t feel amazing. It also feels far worse than Wintertide Brand did last league. That said… I am very very low level and want to give this build until maybe level 90 before I pass proper judgment. For now, it is perfectly fine and I am able to clear yellow-tier maps with ease… which isn’t amazing considering how much currency I have spent on this stupid build.
One of the challenges with the build is that realistically it wants to use a bunch of uniques. The hardest part about that is the fact that I am using two Call of the Brotherhood rings which gives me 96% cold conversion. Rings are a really hard slot to give up when it comes to making your resistances work, given that there are a number of ring-exclusive implicits that add a bunch of value resistance-wise. The single most expensive item was a six-link Inpulsa’s Broken Heart and since I knew I was going to be running this build I shopped around for this for awhile and managed to snag a “cheap” one for 3 divine orbs. The Crown of the Inward Eye is just a universally good helm, and I managed to pick up one with a Determination Reservation Efficiency enchant for if I remember correctly only 40 Chaos. The Brotherhood Rings were 20 Chaos Each from the same vendor, which shocked me given that they had already spent catalysts on them to get the quality up to 20%.
I’ve also been spending some time playing around with using Heatshiver instead of Crown of the Inward Eye, and I think that might be the correct play. The negative is that I lose my Determination Enchant, and I dislike running Labyrinth enough to farm another one. What this has forced me to do is drop Zealotry and swap it for Discipline to make up for the loss in Energy Shield. Zealotry was mostly being used for the Crit aura as I am already generating nearly 100% uptime on Consecrated Ground. I think I can give up some crit chance for effectively doubling my damage output in some cases. The Heatshiver also has the side benefit of giving me some resistances which are nice, and could allow me to rework my resist gear a bit.
As it stands… I have to heavily utilize my shield, belt, necklace, boots, and gloves to be able to reach resistance caps. I think a lot of the challenge of this build is that I am gaining next to nothing from the tree itself and rings are worth so much freaking resistance. I could of course start slotting more gems into my tree as I pour on levels but I am already using up 3 possible sockets to solve another problem that I will talk about next. The biggest problem with this guild is that for whatever reason… it was ungodly expensive. I think I paid 120 Chaos for the boots, and 150 Chaos for the gloves. The Stygian Vise was 90 Chaos, and the shield I think was around 80 Chaos. We are dealing with some massive price inflation this league caused by just how much currency is being generated by the re-introduction of Sanctum.
Since I did not have a great way of dealing with elemental ailments, I had to eat up the abyssal socket in my belt and two jewel sockets on my tree in order to roll out the “Chance to Avoid Being Shocked” and Stormshroud combo. Essentially if you can get a “chance to avoid being shocked” to at least 100%, the Stormshroud Unique jewel will apply that avoidance to all elemental ailments. At a minimum, this requires either support on your tree or two abyssal jewels with a maximum of 50% on each. This was also not a cheap prospect as I gave around 100 Chaos for each of the Abyssal Jewels and 1.5 Divines for the Stormshroud. I’ve known about this combo for ages, but never actually had to buy my way into it. In theory, this is the way that I am supposed to be fixing Righteous Fire so that I can drop “Purity of Elements”. I’ve just never gone through the motions to make that happen.
So in the end… I have spent 8-10 Divines on a build that I am not really in love with. I have shit armor, shit evasion, bad block, and the only thing really going for me is consecrated ground which applies to both life and energy shield which when combined with petrified blood does a decent enough job at keeping me alive. I am having to change my instincts of trying to move when I am taking damage, to instead standing still and hoping that the consecrated ground will be able to keep up with the damage intake. I am deeply susceptible to being one-shot by certain mechanics because I just don’t have that much effective health. This is most obviously an issue with Physical Hits, because if POB is to be believed I can only soak a maximum hit of just under 7000.
Then again I am only 74… so I am giving this build time to come into its own. I am going to try and give it until level 90 before I pass judgment. I definitely think the state of the build is better than it was in Kalandra league but given my druthers, I would probably rather play Wintertide Brand Occultist. Switching to Heatshiver has definitely helped though, so I am going to run a bunch more maps to start to get the swing of how the build feels. As always my goal here is to give you all the honest assessment of how a build feels. If you are curious you can check out the POB that I dumped this morning of the state of where I am with my character.