1.3.1 - My First Build - Wings of Entropy

Hi, welcome to my first build. I haven't been playing PoE for very long and I wanted to formally make a build. This is my first character that's past level 60. I'm looking for some advice that any of you may have.

The reason for this build:
-Cheap
-Easy to use
-Fairly tanky

The mains theme is to use Dual Strike with Melee Splash to deal damage. With the addition of Leap Slamming into mobs to curse them with Enfeeble. It uses 3 aura; Hatred, Grace, and Herald of Ash. Also managed to fit in blood rage for some extra speed and a lot of life leech.

At level 81 current stats:


Passive tree:


Reasoning behind it

I started through the melee damage area, but also had the option to go through the all resist 3 nodes, if my accessories weren't good enough. Went through the life wheel and took Sentinel and Berserking. Because I was already going there I took diamond skin for the extra resist. I'll also end up getting Barbarism for more resist and life

Because I'm using 3 auras I picked up Sovereignty and got Devotion along the way. The Devotion wheel is a good wheel all around, but especially so because of the buff increase. Next to Sovereignty I took the chaos resistance + max life nodes. I benefit a lot from chaos resistance because I'm using blood rage almost 100% of the time.

I got just about every major dex node that was close by to be able to use Grace. It's not too huge of the impact because a lot of the dex nodes have secondary effects. Early on I was using Haste instead for the extra damage and movement speed. Later on I switched to grace when the content got more difficult.

Resolute technique was a no-brainer. There's minimal crit in this build, so the 100% accuracy gives a much higher DPS increase, and the tree already branched out into that region anyways.

As far as damage goes, took every strong node that was close by. All the major axe wheels and a few 2-hander nodes. I made sre getting there had a lot of good nodes on the way (butcher + born to fight area).

Went down into the duelist to take the 3 major nodes in the middle that are all very good. Along the way got Destroyer and Dervish. Then went down and got some more dex and the Splitting strikes wheel.


Gear + Gems:


Because I'm a pretty new player, I needed all the gear to be cheap. A chose a non-legacy Bringer of Rain because it's by far the cheapest psuedo-6 link for offensive gems. The all of the sockets are all 4-links, which are fairly cheap to make/craft. Wings of entropy is both strong offensively and defensively (with the 25% block and decent dps) and were very cheap to get.

Because BoR+WoE give so much block chance I took Stone of Lazhwar and Rainbowstrides to get to 100% block converted to spell block.

From there I did the best I could with the 4 remaining slots to cap resistances, get more life/armour, and some damage increase too.

Flasks:


Because the tree gives a lot of +%armour I found granite flasks to be absolutely amazing. I was already using grace, so any additional evasion didn't see nearly as much benefit as additional defense did.

Defense while using 1 of the 2 granite flasks:


The extra chaos resistance helps with fully mitigating blood rage's negative effect (essentially increasing life regen) while also giving an insane amount of life leech and a lot of damage. It synergies nicely with WoE which already has chaos damage on it.

Damage while using Atziri's Promise:


Possible changes:

Replace Enfeeble with Warlord's Mark. Or both Enfeeble and CoH with Increase Duration + Enduring Cry.

At the moment I only have 3 maximum endurance charges. I found the CoH Enduring Cry rarely had the chance to get 4 or 5 endurance charges. However, the +1 maxmimum endurance nodes are only 1 node away, so if I do decide to increase my maximum endurance charges I'd consider changing. I just didn't want to have to stand around casting Enduring Cry wherever I go.

Replace Blood Magic with Added fire and get Mana Leech from accessories

I considered this. The 2 major factors into going for Blood Magic was. First, I had already gotten my accessories sorted out and didn't want to try and get different ones. Second, I don't have a lot of mana, so I might have had to drop Herald of Ash to make room for more.

Some final things:
Gems in the chest piece can still be leveled up, even though they're unusable. So using a tabula rasa to freely level up gems is helping me make some money with no cost to my stats.
Stone of Lazhwar gives +28 int, so I didn't need to get any int nodes that weren't coincidental.
Because I already have 100% block applied to spells, Rumi's +10% applied to spells counts for double

If you have any advice, or anything I might have missed feel free to say so in the replies. I really enjoyed building and playing this :)