Chieftain

Fire Shield Crush Updates

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Good Morning Folks! I thought I would give a bit of a quick update on the state of my Fire Conversion Shield Crush Chieftain. When I last posted about the build I was sitting at 78 and I have now put on another nine levels and am sitting at 87. Levels have helped quite a bit, as has a bit of gear swapping. The end result feels a bit closer to what I would consider a proper build. There have been a few times in this “Bel makes Videos” adventure where I have recorded a bit of an update because the build has suddenly felt much better to play. All in all, this is probably still not something that I would suggest to anyone because for the amount of effort I have poured into it… it still is not what I would consider a fast mapper or honestly particularly great at any sort of content.

Here is some updated gameplay that I recorded yesterday over my lunch break. If you compare this to the previous video, you can already see that not only am I running a harder map but I am also zipping through the packs much faster. The Achilles heel of the build continues to be bosses and the fact that anything with resistance takes forever to chew through even with flammability, fire penetration, and the Ramako ascendancy. The other glaring problem is that I have negative amounts of chaos resistance, which makes for a pretty quick death on occasion. I am slowly working my way towards the 10% of armor applies to Chaos Resistance mastery which I am hoping will at least help a bit.

To get where I am now, I have swapped out several gear slots so let’s dive into some of those decisions. Firstly I gave up chaos resistance and my rare helmet to go over to the armor stacking staple The Formless Flame. This is something I should have done from the start, but I was honestly more concerned about not having any chaos resistance than I was over the huge benefits of this item. I swapped from Immortal Flesh which I had been using for some life and regeneration, back to Arn’s Anguish the DPS belt that gives me a lot of Armor, Brutality Stacks, and some more Fire Resistance which then converts to at least some regeneration. I swapped out my rare boots with chaos resistance for Legacy of Fury which gives additional explosions and applies scorch to everything for more fire damage. Lastly, I swapped from my previous corrupted Emperor’s Vigilance to one with a bit more Armor and Energy shield since the price of those shields has crashed since I bought mine and I might as well min/max that a bit.

So when my flasks are ticking, which they usually are given they are all “flagellant” meaning I gain stacks while being hit… I am sitting at over 109k armor. This of course gets converted to attack damage which then gets converted to fire damage… which means the more defenses that I pour on the more damage I deal. Additionally, I talked about this in the build, but I did swap my Amethyst Flask for a perfectly rolled Rumi’s Concoction that I had sitting in the bank which gives me a capped block chance for both spells and attacks at 75%. Once I get the 10% of armor applied to chaos damage node, that should give me 10,962 armor being applied to chaos damage which should at least give me a bit of wiggle room even when I have negative resistance.

The challenge that I find myself in is that my next really huge upgrade would be swapping my Brass Dome out for a Grasping Mail. More specifically I need one that has rolled with the “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” prefix which cannot be rolled/crafted and has to drop natively on the item. The biggest challenge with all of this is… even a shitty one sells for around 10 Divine Orbs and for one that is already linked you are talking somewhere in the 25-50 Divine Orb range. I just feel like that is way more currency that I want to spend on this build especially when swapping this out would mean I would be down 4% maximum resistance and lose my crit immunity. Moreover even after swapping this… I would still largely be fucked on Chaos Resistance. While I have the currency to buy one of these, and then link it myself… I just have stayed my hand because I can’t see spending it on a build that I am not even sure about. I would probably rather spend that currency on upgrades for my SRS Guardian or RF Juggernaut as both of them feel worlds better than this character.

I think more than anything, Shield Crush Chieftain has been a fun experiment. It was a costly experiment, but it at least satiated my desire to see what Shield Crush and the new Chieftain changes were all about. I thought I would have put this character to bed long before now, but I continue to dink around with it. I am likely to swap back to either the Jugg or the Guardian however to knock out some of my missing league achievements so I can get another sad little totem pole for my hideout. This would be my third one if I managed to knock out two more achievements before the end of the league. Additionally, I am on the cusp of finishing up Diablo III Season 29, so I will probably be spending some time wrapping that up over the weekend.

That said… I am already contemplating a totally different distraction. Sir Gog is one of my favorite Path of Exile YouTubers, and he will be hosting a private league event starting this weekend. The idea is that it will be a crafting league and that everything is going to be dropping scoured so that you have to craft your own statistics on it. I am contemplating doing another SRS Guardian, largely as a way to test SSF Viability of the build for future leagues. I am not entirely certain this is going to happen, but I believe the league starts sometime around 7 p.m. for me. If you want to give this a shot check out the video above or the league invite page.

Fire Shield Crush Chieftain

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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.

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.