Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bad weather night so I am running on minimal sleep. However that said I recorded a video of gameplay of my Shield Crush of the Chieftain Juggernaut… which is a mouthful. At this point, I am level 86 and have picked up most of the things I was seeking out, and feel relatively confident that I can make a general pronouncement about the build as a whole. Does it work well enough? Sure. Does it feel amazing? Not really. The problem with Shield Crush in general is that it is largely a stationary ability and in order to crank up its damage, you probably want to be running it with Multistrike. I personally don’t like the way Multistrike feels, so for reference, I am using Melee Splash instead in my gameplay.
I think the ideal playstyle is to gather up a bunch of mobs and then burn it all down at once from a stationary position. This works but also doesn’t necessarily feel amazing for mapping, especially not when you are going to struggle with a lot of tankier mobs. This was admittedly the very first T16 that I had attempted and it went smoothly enough. I never really came close to dying, and a lot of the mobs were taken out pretty easily but each time it stranded a single rare that I needed to chew thing. I am wondering if maybe the play would have been to try and run this build as a Chieftain for Hinekora explosions which would honestly go a very long way towards feeling tasty with clears. However, in that scenario, I would have probably chosen to go with a Cloak of Flames/Damage Conversion setup rather than trying to get as much armor out of my chest as possible.
The problem with armor scaling and damage conversion is that it requires some very specific items… a few of which are a bit “spendy” in a normal league. For example, I was able to pick up this grasping mail with the “Armour is Increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” for around 8 Divines in this league, but I have priced out the same item in other leagues and they were going for around 25 Divines. The cheaper option that gives you the same explicit is Formless Flame which itself can have over 1000 Armor but comes with a -30% Fire Resistance penalty reducing how much scaling you can easily get. Legitimately the more I sit here and think about it, the more I am wondering what converting this over to chieftain would do. If I did so I would end up dropping all of the crit nodes and go for Resolute Technique.
The other piece that artificially inflates the price of this build is my Aul’s Uprising. I picked this up off the ground so it cost me nothing, but these often go for several Divines in a more normal league. In this league, there are only a couple of stacks of chaos orbs. Essentially this is allowing me to not have to deal with trying to anoint charisma to fit in all of my auras as I am running Determination, Grace, and Defiance Banner all to keep bumping up that Armor score to 250k. I do wonder however if this would be better with a Strength stacking setup and running Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler and leaning more into the fire damage. I might Path of Building out some of these divergent paths to see if one of them is clearly better than the others. No one seems to have solved this problem as right now there are only four builds on the ladder that are attempting to use this ability… two of which are using it for Generals Cry.
There is a version in Hardcore however where someone has leaned heavily into the ignite damage and I am curious if maybe that is the correct play. Similar to what I said above they went down the Resolute Technique path of dealing zero crits, and have instead scaled similar to how you would scale Righteous Fire. This biggest change though is that they ended up going with a Dawnbreaker which can get upwards of 2000 Armor on a single item. Then interestingly they used Dyadian Dawn which is largely thought of as the “Explosive Arrow” belt as it was popularized with that build, but makes it so that you deal zero physical damage but your ignites deal damage faster. I think I might go down this rabbit hole a bit further because at the moment I am largely dissatisfied with the current state of my build.
Anyways this is part of the fun of Path of Exile… sometimes you go down a path that is a dead end. Sometimes that path branches a bit but can still maybe end up in an interesting place. I am maybe not giving up on this one yet.
