Good Morning Folks! I’ve continued to descend into madness with my Scion and last night made a number of changes. Firstly you will notice that I have a giant firey ring of death… aka Righteous Fire. At this point you are thinking “Bel, you said this was an Armageddon Brand Build”, which is fair and that is still very much the case. The thing is RF gets used in a bunch of builds that are not necessarily relying on it as the primary damage source. In the case of my nonsense build… I am mostly using it as a flat 41% Spell Damage buff, while also doing a decent job of mopping up little things that get a bit too close. The other thing you might notice is that I have reserved almost all of my mana bar, and half of my life bar, meaning I am living somewhat dangerously.
I’ve opted to play around with Petrified Blood, which is the first time I have really used this as a defensive layer. The idea behind it is that you cannot recover more than half of your life, but the bottom half of your life bar… is “protected” in that 92% of damage taken is doled out to you slowly over time… allowing your regeneration to have time to work. Given that my goal with this build is to largely stack life and regeneration, I thought this might be a viable option, and other than causing me to freak out all the time… so far it appears to be working. I’ve included tooltips for both Armageddon Brand and Righteous Fire so you can see where I am currently. Based on Path of Building my numbers do not look amazing… but I am also dealing with a lot of level 14ish skill gems so that should improve over time and levels gained.
Last night I beat my third labyrinth and finished choosing my second ascendency for Scion. I was leaning towards Chieftan just for the regen, raw fire damage, and ability to cover enemies in Ash. The 10% Strength boost may also be good if I pick back up the ability that converts the strength damage bonus to spell damage. All told I think this combo is probably about as good as it gets for Armageddon Brand Scion. I would probably never purposefully build this way again, but in this experiment, I am just rolling with what I happen to have currently. The notable that I need to figure out a way to pick up is Pain Attunement. Since I am permanently on “Low Life” this will give me a significant boost in damage. I do not believe this can be anointed, but it is available as an option from crucible weapons. I need to sift through my stack of rejected sceptres and see if any of them have it.
I got to Act 10 last night before I went outside to play with Greybie. I will likely finish that up over lunch. I often slow-walk Act 10, but really… the only reason why I tend to do that is to finish up my third Labyrinth before taking another resistance hit. Given that I have already done this… I should probably just finish things up and then begin trying to fix my resists permanently and swap out some gear. I’ve taken my sweet time with this character, mostly because I’ve enjoyed the relaxing leveling process but now I am curious how well it is going to do in early maps. I am having way more fun with this character than I ever expected. When I created it, I legitimately expected it to be a throw-away experience and to never log into it again after beating Dominus. I am super excited about the possibility of what ExileCon might bring, and also really interested to see the announcement of the next FFXIV expansion this weekend as well.