[2.0.3] Tanky Sword & Shield - A medieval knight in modern times (Reave-Cyclone-Double Strike)

Pros
-Extremely tanky without gimmicks like cwdt's, flasks, vaals, auras etc
-31 block chance from tree, meaning 62 block with worst shield (with Tempest shield and regular BoR)
-Very flexible - Evasion vs Armour, life vs damage, skill options, however you like it
-Counterattacks! Free leech, free damage, free charges, free cursing, free mods...
-%100-99 uptime on Fortify (depending on your skill of choice)
-Physical damage is non-existent in maps
-Can do ANY map mod with little need for adjustment
-Very high leech rate and flask recovery-%0 to 100 life in a second combined
-6 free slots to level gems EXCLUDING second weapon set
-Can cap chaos resist
-Can get resists on tree easily
-Cheap enough to make this your first SERIOUS build
-Your life refills itself by itself in mere 3 seconds even without you doing anything! You effectively have tens of thousands of life.
Cons
-Feels like too little DPS from time to time, high level bosses might take ages to kill
-New players might find it hard to cap resists with 3 slots unusable, I'm not sure
-Not recommended for starters, try easier builds to gather some Chaos Orbs and rare equipment before this
-Still can't tank some of the infamous one-hit KO's as some high ES builds do (they still can be blocked with your %75 block chance though)
-No particular elemental damage reduction (but keep in mind you can counter and leech off anything that hits you including spells)

Total Physical Damage Mitigation
Right now, with the equipment you see here, I have 13500 armour and 2500 Eva, meaning;
%21 estimated Evasion on level 90 (which is probably like 35-40 on level 60)
%75 block chance
%58 estimated phys reduction on level 90 +%12 from Endurance charges
resulting in a LOL inducing 6% of physical attack damage taken in total

If you don't understand, let me explain: Imagine you're in a 77 map, and there are 200 mobs swinging at you, each of them dealing 756 damage each (according to wiki). You evade 42 of the attacks, and block 119 of them. The remaining 39 that managed to hit you do 173 damage each after armour. So the resulting total damage mitigation is %95.5 . Calculations are made according to pathofexile.wikipedia.com

I just wanted you to notice that we were against a total of 151200 damage here. With your Reckoning, you could just AFK kill these mobs without ever noticing your life going down to less than 9/10, while most builds have already died 50 times over.

Leeching
Just skipping mana leech. Trust me, 0.3% mana leech on gloves is all you need, granted you have Warlord's Mark on Reckoning.

As for life leech, the tree has %32 increased leech rate along with +8% max. leech rate. This means you leech %28 of you life per second almost all the time, and along with your flask nodes, it takes near 1.5 sec to fill up your life all the way.

I know I should have screenshots for these things, sorry about having to write it.

With the tree and the equipment you see here, my Reave does 31k DPS while Double Strike always has approx. %33 more of Reave (because of the base damage). With Blood Rage I get around 35K, and 40000 with Frenzy Charges that come from it. Add Rallying Cry, and I get up to 42000 depending on the crowd. Pop Atziri's Promise, and I get 50k, and Double Strike gets 67k. This increases will work largely multiplicative with you too(if you follow the build), meaning if you normally have, say, 20k, with all the buffs you will have 20000*5/3=33k damage, approximately. Except Atziri's promise, the buffs are pretty much self maintaining, so you'll have them %99 of the time. Rallying cry is 0.25 seconds, you won't notice it.

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgQAAecCEQMnBS0JMwz3EPAUIBRNFHEVIBXsGJEZtBo-GlUblxuqG60j9igqLYMvzDB8MbAyTjboPeI9_ECgRNJHfkjuTGBNRk2SUEdXVFhjXz9hIWFSYuxjF2VNdO12rHk5eu982X11fuKBOoIHhNmE74VShmCI7YqzivCLT4zPjX2TqJd5m2qezaOKo-enMKmVqfqsr62NuR28n702vqfAv8EHwYLKkMv1z37RNtN-1FLXftfL2WHZfNrB3L3h7-Is5FHnD-lG6dXqGO8O73ryL_Ja9kj2o_cy-Ov8S3iu level 91
We get all the damage we can while maintaining at least %150 life. My recommendation is that if you don't have much life on your gear, spec into more life until you get some. Aim for 5000 life, if you can get it with %150 life (I do) I recommend taking damage nodes after that instead of more life.

The tree still allows for %25 increased life, but I'd rather have more damage instead of life. Your call.

Here is a levelling tree for you, you can find your balance between defence and offense as you wish:

Head

This infamous 7-link OP helmet is the only thing you need to pick up the build and get it going. Life, damage, 3 free supports... Though it's not unquestionably the best, if you have a 6L Belly or Daresso you might swap it with Devoto's Devotion, but not worth even bothering IMO.
Amulet

Stone of Lazhwar with +1 curse corrupt is the best thing you can hope for in this slot. Reckoning is a free curse machine, and it's easy enough to link two curses instead of one, so definitely recommended. My second choice would be spell block, or regular block if you don't have a legacy BoR.
Shield

Go for the highest armour you can here, since we have %400 increased defences, meaning 2000 armour here will shoot you to somewhere near 11500 just by itself, counting other armour nodes. Or, you can go armour/eva if you like, but NOT eva only. I'll explain later. Go for life too if you can, but it's often times either armour or life since they are both prefixes.
Sword

Simple enough slot, just go for dps. One thing to say is, if you can choose between a slow hard hitter or a fast mosquito biter, go for the slow hitter. Because;
-Less mana usage
-Counterattacks have nothing to do with attack speed, and you do want them to hit hard since they leech so well.


As you see I have a chest armour too. Why, do you ask? Or maybe, how?
As for how, BoR says you can't USE chest armour, not equip it. But why equip it if you can't use it? Because you want to level up gems as you go, so you can sell and use or profit and stuff.

Bringer of Rain
Reave-Added Fire- weapon Elemental - Multistrike - Melee phys-Faster attacks-Blind
OR
Cyclone-Added Fire-Weapon elemental-Fortify/Increased AoE/Concentrated Effect- blah blah
Gloves or Boots
Reckoning-Curse on Hit-Curse-Curse
There are 3 candidates for curses here- Warlord's mark, Vulnerability, and Enfeeble. Vulnerability is for offense, and you definitely don't need two defensive curses. Take your pick.
The Rest
Herald of Ash
Hatred
Blood Rage
Whirling Blades-Fortify
Vaal Reave
Optionals
Shield Charge
Vengeance/Riposte - Endurance Charge on Melee Stun/Life leech/Melee physical damage
Just take your pick and experiment, these are all viable links

This build can;
+Open strongboxes and alt-tab to Facebook until the box is open
+Do ALL map mods-just don't use auras on blood magic, nothing else
+Do Atziri-needs a few fail rounds for practice though, walk in the park when you learn
+AFK kill melee bosses below 79 maps
+Facetank Voll in lvl 80 map (or was it 81?)
+Do 81 maps-slow! recommend a glass cannon party member-never got a 82
+Stack chaos res-I can do 50, a bit rich guys can easily do 75
+-I never tried, but I'm confident Uber is possible
+Rek most builds on PvP (recommend heavy stirke for that)
+Actually have a chance in Grandmasters Map, but needs practice
This build can't;
-Tank some of the infamous one hit KO's like Vaal smash in Atziri (or some of them just barely)
-Speed run maps above 77, they take a little more time compared to 2h builds
Not much else you can't do, really

There's no need not to use a Vaal skill, the question is which one? Haste, Reave, Cyclone? The answer is clear: Reave it is.
You see, Vaal Reave has a dirty secret noone actually knows about. When you use Vaal Reave, you get 8 stacs of Reave instead of the max. 4. Meaning you get TWICE the usual size of Reave, and you keep those stacks as long as you hit something with Reave. You can basically clear the entire map on 8 stacks, and if you lose them, just use Vaal Reave again.

They are both equally viable, so this calls for a Pros-Cons list.
Reave
+Much bigger AoE
+Even bigger AoE with Vaal Reave
+Safer since it's pretty much a ranged attack
+Can leech very well off big crowds
+Better clearspeed against squishy mobs
+You stun mobs from afar, adding another layer of safety
-Doesn't let you use your counterattack skills so much
-Less damage compared to Cyclone
-Can't leech very well against few targets (still good enough though)
Cyclone
+Incredible leech potential even against few enemies
+Higher damage (really shows itself against tanky packs)
+Your counterattack skills go off like fireworks
+%100 uptime on Fortify if you choose it
-Slower clearing in most scenarios because of small AoE
-Innately dangerous since you roll in between the mobs, but I wouldn't worry for one second
-Tar is the worst

Blind is OP. When you blind an enemy, it loses %50 of its chance to hit. Meaning, as you'll most probably have an evasion near 2500, which means %20 chance to evade at least, when you blind your enemy your chance to evade jumps to %60 when enemy chance to hit is halved, as (%100-%20)/2=%40.
Even with slow base weapons you'll have around 6 aps with both Reave and Cyclone, which means, through some exponential distribution calculations, there's a %45 chance you'll blind an enemy within one second, %70 in two, and %91 in 4 seconds, which is the duration of blind. So you'll permanently blind bosses with %91 chance. (halve the durations for Double Strike since it hits twice as much) Let's see what that means.
No matter how high bosses' accuracy is, game mechanics dictate that it can't be more than %95. So bosses will have %47.5 chance to hit against you. Coupled with %75 block chance, bosses have %12 chance to actually damage you. (as opposed to 23%) You won't die with a single hit, that's for sure. And with the speed you're leeching life back, the only way you're going to just maaaybe possibly die is getting hit twice in a row. And chances of that happening is %1.5 . Take that, any physical hit based bosses.
Gotta say though, these calculations aren't really about this build in particular. These are valid for anyone with %75 block and blind.

Most people would go straight for armour I believe, but evasion also has its benefits, and worth a consideration at least.
Armour reduces the damage you take while evasion lets you not get hit in the first place. The thing is, though, evasion does nothing against physical spells, which are probably the most dangerous kind of spells. However, armour's damage reduction has a maximum of roughly 1/10 of its value, meaning the most damage reduction you'll get out of 14000 armour is 1400, and there are even some blue mobs that can hit 4000 physical damage with totem and rare monster auras, against which your armour is not very helpful. An unlucky streak of not blocking could get you killed in 2-3 hits even though you had 14k armour. Evasion does not work like that, however. Your chances of evading has nothing to do with the damage, so mixing up evasion with armour seems like a good idea to me.

With that said, evasion isn't nearly as effective to stack up as armour especially since you have %75 block anyway, so it's not really useful to stack evasion past %20-25 estimated chance to evade, which means somewhere over 2000 evasion, which you can get from BoR alone, so I don't recommend using armour/eva shield end-game, but it is a viable option until you find high armour tower shield.

Normal: Oak
Cruel: 3 viable options here, but I'd go for passive point
Merciless: Passive, but Frenzy Charge is also a viable option