Good Morning Folks! I thought this morning I would talk about my latest mess of a build in depth. I mentioned this on Friday, but essentially this build came about because I wanted a reason to play a Chieftain with its new ascendancy and a reason to play Shield Crush. While there are no actual guides on how to play a Shield Crush Chieftan, there are folks playing Physical to Fire Conversion Chieftans and folks playing Shield Crush. So as a result I spent quite a bit of time on POE.Ninja and kitbashed together something that felt right. I have no clue if anything I am doing is close to optimal, but I can clear red maps so I am going to call that a win. While nothing about this morning’s post is purporting to be a guide, here is my POB if you are interested in trying to follow along.

• Shield Crush Chieftain Fire Conversion POB

I recorded some footage of me doing a yellow map… largely because I am trying for the third league in a row to farm the damned Primeval hideout, which requires a lot of luck and running Primordial Blocks. I feel like the above gameplay does a pretty good job of highlighting both the strengths of the build and the weaknesses. The strength is when I charge into a pack of mobs, they usually explode in a brilliant pyroclastic wave. The weakness is… any time I encounter something fire-resistant or extremely tanky. I wind up getting a Niko elemental that is both Soul Eater and Shakiri Touched… and it takes for freaking ever to chew through. All in all, though it feels pretty enjoyable and is extremely tanky.

The new Chieftain ascendancy is this weird mixed bag of extremely powerful nodes and some that are situationally good. The real benefit of this ascendancy is that you can easily fix your elemental resistances. The side benefit is that Hinekora Death’s Fury causes big fire explosions… far bigger than anyone expected when this was announced. It isn’t quite an entire screen radius but it is almost there. I feel like the correct order to choose these is Tasalio, Hinekora, and then Valako because it allows you to fix your resists sooner rather than later. The fourth node is less certain because you have a few options with no clear winner. I am likely going to go with Ramako because it is the lazy option. Ngamahu is probably technically better but it requires you to carefully plan which nodes to put non-unique jewels in to get the maximum benefit in stacking Fire Damage. At least I will likely go Ramako for now and then maybe shift to Ngamahu after some more levels and thinking about it.

Let’s look at a couple of abilities that are key to this build. Shield Crush and Shield Charge are similar in that they scale based on the armor and evasion rating on your shield. This means the more armor or evasion that you happen to have, the more damage that attack is going to do. They also scale based on your physical damage as a whole, so I am looking specifically for ways to scale that. They are both tagged as AOE, and in a perfect world I would be able to incorporate something into the build that gives gem levels to “All AOE Gems” but unfortunately I don’t have that in the build. Given that physical is kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, I am converting as much of it as possible to Fire Damage, which gives me a number of other scaling options. I am primarily accomplishing this through a combination of the Avatar of Fire keystone, The Fire Mastery that converts 40% of physical damage to Fire, and Herald of Ash.

So we know from Shield Crush, that I want as much armor or evasion on my shield as humanly possible. That really probably means that you are looking at either Emperor’s Vigilance or Dawnbreaker. Both of them have very specific reasons to use them and I wound up going with Emperor’s Vigilance because it saves me two passive skill points on the tree, because I wanted Glancing Blows either way. The other semi-required unique would be Replica Dreamfeather which allows me to scale my attack damage based on how much armor I have which allows me to turn a defensive layer into an offensive layer. Currently, I have 36471 armor which would give me 81% increased attack damage. This is most definitely not what I would consider a cheap build, because I think at this point I am about 10 Divine Orbs into it.

Since I was already spending a good deal of money on this build, I decided to go all in and lean on the Replica Dragonfang’s Flight which in spite of its name… has nothing to do with the other replica items from Heist. This is a weird new item that gives +3 gem levels to a specific gem and there exists a version of this amulet for every skill gem in the game. Some of these are extremely expensive, but Shield Crush is one of the cheaper ones and can be picked up for under a hundred chaos. I’m also taking advantage of the Circle of Anguish which scales my fire damage and increases my fire resistance by quite a bit because I will always be running Herald of Ash. This squeezes things a bit and keeps me from being able to cap Chaos Resistance because the large number of uniques that I am running makes it a bit challenging.

Since I want to have a bunch of armor, and it is relatively straightforward to get 4000 armor on a Brass Dome … that also comes along with crit immunity I decided to lean on that chest piece. I managed to find a bargain on a 4% to all maximum resistances chest with all of the right colors and a 6% reduced fire damage taken corruption for 2 Divines. The negative is I no longer gain life from strength, and as a result, I am a bit low on life as a whole. To help mitigate some of that, and to give me a bit of regeneration I decided to lean on a well-rolled Immortal Flesh. There are other options that would not give me as many defensive layers for example Arn’s Anguish is something I have seen used on a few Shield Crush builds. I like survival and I like feeling tanky so… regen is a win for me.

This leaves me leaning on Boots, Gloves, and Helm to try and fix my Chaos Resistance while also stacking as much Fire Resistance as possible… which then in turn fixes my other Resists thanks to Tasalio Ascendancy talent. I also needed to lean on these sockets to fix my lack of Dexterity… which made the gear really really expensive. Normally to get Dex on an item it needs to be an evasion base, but I want Armor given that I don’t currently have access to Iron Reflexes to convert Evasion back into Armor. I think honestly the BEST version of this build we double dipping from armor and evasion to convert it with that keystone. It does make me think that maybe Champion would be the best possible class for a Shield Crush build.

All in all, I enjoy the build. I need a heck of a lot more levels on it and the more I play it the better it feels. Do I think this was worth 10 Divines? Probably not. If I spend more time working on this build I would really like to have Forbidden Flesh/Forbidden Flame jewels that give me Unbreakable from Juggernaut, but they are currently ungodly expensive. There are a bunch of expensive things that I could do to optimize my damage but for the moment… I think I just need to pile on more levels. Would I suggest this to someone who just wants to map quickly? Probably not. Is it fun in its own way? Absolutely.