[Fury of Tukohama] Dual Ancestral Protector Melee Totem Marauder

Hi, welcome to my first build guide on a character I have been playing as my league started on Perandus Softcore, although not very high level at the moment (level 74), I feel confident enough to write a guide on this character.

______________________________________________________________________________________________


Build Concept

This build utilizes the newly released Ancestral Protector (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Ancestral_Protector) skill, along with the Ancestral Bond keystone to summon two melee totems to deal damage to your enemies. This setup will disable the damage from yourself but you can still proc on hit effect with it. Using a Kongor's Undying Rage (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Kongor%27s_Undying_Rage) unique Terror Maul, we do not need to take the Resolute Technique keystone and can use critical strikes to proc on hit effects. Elemental Overload, as well as a heavy focus on elemental damage in support gems and auras will allow us to take advantage of Kongor's Unique traits. A Romira's Banquet is also used to rapidly generate power charges in order for us to critical strike. An Empire's Grasp is also used with an Earthquake knockback setup to "vacuum" enemies in the range of our totems.

______________________________________________________________________________________________


Pros and Cons of the Build

Pros

Extremely cheap to get going, I played this as my league starter

Pretty High Damage, with rubbish gear and a level 74 character who didn't invest a lot into damage nodes, I can have around 20k DPS per totem, higher with Lion's Roar up.

Very safe, it's melee, without actually being melee, since the totems hit for you, you can just dance around the out-skirt avoiding attacks.

Looks and feel cool and thematic (very Kauri and Spirital)

Decent clear speed

Cons

Only Decent clear speed, it's not Lightning Arrow Voltaxic or Projectile Speed Pierce Spark level of clear speed


It's not technically melee, but you are still in melee range


______________________________________________________________________________________________

Gear Choices for this Build

Weapon Slot


This is the most interesting slot for this build. For weapon, we use a Kongor's Undying Rage unique Terror Maul




Kongor's Undying Rage has always been kinda meh for the last few patches, it's DPS is not bad, but you could always find bettter at a reasonable price, and a the buff to its crit chance in 2.0 was undocumented. This weapon is pretty special due to its unique mods " Hits Can't Be Evaded, Critical Hit does not deal increased damage, Gain onslaught on Crit". While this might sound like the Resolute Technique Keystone, it is in fact different. Resolute Technique disable your ability to crit while Kongor make them deal normal damage instead of increased damage, while this would normally be no different, Ascendancy introduced the new Elemental Overload keystone, which grants us 40% MORE elemental damage for 8 seconds on crit at the cost of no crit multipliers. Elemental Overload allows us to scale Elemental Damage effectively on this weapon in order to gain a lot of damage.

Comparing this with a normal two-hander, say Kaom's Primacy, Atizir's Disfavour, Marohi Erqi or even a Mirrored Coronal Maul or a Vaal Axe , those two handers do not have the Hits Can't be Evaded Mod, and therefore have to take Resolute Technique since they wouldn't be able to use Two Handers effectively anyway with that low accuracy, and this means that Elemental Overload is a keystone only effectively usable by Kongor's Undying Rage.


Now, let's get down to some math on this. We use several ways to increased our elemental damage, Added Fire, Hatred aura, Herald of Ash and Physical to Lightning. At gem level 20, Hatred Grants 36% of Cold Damage, Herald of Ash grants 15%, Added Fire grants 44%, Physical to Lightning grants 29% as well as converting another 50%. That is a total of 124% of extra damage added as Elemental Damage, so, out of 224% base damage, only 50% is physical, the rest are all elemental damage. So, that means the 40% Elemental Overload damage is an effective 31% MORE damage for us (since we are using Ancestral Protector, if you are using Ice Crash, which is another build, you get the full 40%).

Searching on PoE trade, a top end Disfavour has around 610 DPS, while a top end Kongor has around 470 DPS, with a 1.31 multiplier on our Kongor (remember Disfavour can't reliably get this due to having to spec into RT or try to fiddle with the insane Accuracy thing), this puts Kongor at an effective 615 base DPS. And with this build, Elemental Overload will always be up, we just managed to turn Kongor into a weapon in the range of Atizri's Disfavour, and that's not even counting the onslaught buff (which lasts for 2 seconds, but we proc this very often as well). And, that's not all, since we crit somewhat often, we also get the juicy elemental status effect, namely shock, which is kinda hard to get on an RT build (Although you could use Vinktar)


So, by using an extremely easy to Get keystone (1 point travel cost, so it's barely anything, not too mention you don't have to travel 1 point to RT, so it balances out), you can effectively turn a 10c weapon into a multiple exalt weapon's DPS, (even surpassing Mirror Quality if you count for shock, which you really shouldn't since it's not that reliable and you are hoping that the Mirrored Weapon user has no way to shock).


Glove Slot




An Empire's Grasp is used for the Knockback effect and the most armor you can get on a glove slot. Since the Totems are immobile and has a fairly mediocre range, this unique Glove is used to vacuum the enemies to you and prevent enemies from fleeing. Earthquake is used to achieve this due its large AoE. The knock back chance is not reliabe at all, however, we solve this with flasks


Ring Slot



Since we do not invest in crits at all, a Romira's Banquet is used to rapidly generate power charges in order for us to crit. Although a crit will remove our power charges, we attack so rapidly with our skills, it does not matter that we lose them occasionally, note that the totems themselves will not proc the Power Charges gain nor the Elemental Overload keystone, so we have to do it manually, but more on that in the skills section


Flask



A Lion's Roar is used to boost our damage, it also grants us knockback on our skills so you can use it with Earthquake to reliably pull in mobs for us to kill.

Other Slots

Just random high armor gear with good life and resists, you could use a Kaom's Heart if you wanted to, although that might be overkill for some.

______________________________________________________________________________________________


Important Skill Choices

Ancestral Protector

Links: AP- Melee Splash - Melee Physical Damage - Added Fire Damage - Physical to Lightning - Weapon Elemental Damage

Ancestral Protector summons a melee totem that attacks enemies while you are near it. The totem uses your weapon. This is our main skill, it grants More Attack speed to you while active, which also buffs the totem since it uses your weapon. This allows us to use our melee weapons while clearing without actually being melee, for tough bosses, this is especially important since you can simply put down the totem and kite the bosses around.

We support it with Melee Splash to turn it to an AoE clear skill, Melee Physical Damage, Added Fire and Phys to Lightning to boost its base damage and elemental damage. Weapon Elemental Damage can be used if you have a six-link. Multistrike is not used since it does not work with Ancestral Protector.


Earthquake

Links: EQ- Knockback (from Empire's Grasp) - Fortify - LGoH - Increased AoE.


For bosses fights, LGoH and Inc AoE can be swapped for Curse on Hit and Punishment. This allows us to apply Fortify to ourselves, and knock enemies in to kill them effectively with totem.


Blade Vortex


This is a surprising one, but it is quite interesting actually. I put this in my CwDT setup with Increased Duration and Immortal Call. A low level Blade Vortex hits extremely quickly, and allows us to generate power charges and the Onslaught buff really easily. With 4 power charges, you could have 15 % chance to crit with it and it allows us to keep Elemental Overload permanently up and Onslaught up almost all the time. This also takes pressure of your Earthquake attacks you don't always have to be hammering people there.

Auras

Hatred and Herald of Ash

Fairly standard setup, nothing much to see here.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Ascendancy Classes

Berserker offers a huge damage increase for you, while Juggeranut gives a giant boost to defence. Chieftain is a mixture of the two. In general, I would say Chieftain is a very good sub-class for this build


______________________________________________________________________________________________

Skilltree

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAEAAMbYWGPDaPhfPfx9-1_QjM8hkPZI6hBfPxo-FCDyL3y47w4pLlBH5FFnm5d5rj4JlsauOQ4LYTwtEMzrCa9sg1-DzP6HhVJo8sWKtz57INlh8B98u_4K-JOtjaIAOtjyRdi9z34nLzrhNZJ2rJBVplf-j-oYGjhN4zGe-OtR5lnzFHF3U3IP2XwOPDs7Zp6CByynOlKexfrSWOXyQUrEeGm8n5SHFm8qE8MT9q4YkfxLJKrjalorFE026aPyGmydrqcI2CTr7lZIfIOa4KeURZ1eXVNS0f0AAA==

This is the skill tree I am using, aim for high life and decent physical damage. Totem placement speed aren't very important since Ancestral Protector has an implicit bonus to it





______________________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you for reading, I will update this guide as new information is released. Feedbacks are very welcomed

awesome, great idea , very original i wud like to see this in action :)

Dunno if you already considered this but you could use Sweep instead of EQ for pulling. Sure it has a bit less aoe but you would have a way to reliable proc knockback without using the Lion Flask. I really like your approach though.

(34 + 39 = 73% knockback btw with a lvl 19-20 sweep in the empire gloves)

P.S. Ty for just unloading my currency on the highest dps Kongor's I could find. Really felt the need to run something with that weapon now.

+1 for the guide.

"

Vandenreich wrote:

Dunno if you already considered this but you could use Sweep instead of EQ for pulling. Sure it has a bit less aoe but you would have a way to reliable proc knockback without using the Lion Flask. I really like your approach though.

(34 + 39 = 73% knockback btw with a lvl 19-20 sweep in the empire gloves)

P.S. Ty for just unloading my currency on the highest dps Kongor's I could find. Really felt the need to run something with that weapon now.

+1 for the guide.

The thing is, Sweep has far less AoE than EQ in my opinion, and I only need the knockback bonus on mobs, bosses are alright without the vacuums. And it's very easy to keep my charges up on mobs, especially since Lion's Roar gives a huge boost to damage anyway, so it's much better in my opinion, just to use EQ to pull in mobs

Nice guide, I'm only lvl 25 with this build but it's been surprisingly good and amusing so far. At which level should I get ancestral bond and elemental overload keystones? Cheers

leveling one right now aswell, switched to ancestral bond at 35, works just fine w/o e/o, the procrate on this one is way too unreliable w/o the proper links nor enough attackspeed so ignore it for now the dmg is fine anyway

Hi guys! Anyone playing this build? I have an EQ build marauder but the more I play it the more I see that my PC is not strong enough for EQ :P I mean it lags every time I kill a bigger pack of monsters. So I have to respec. And from what I see this build would cost me only about 20 regrets to respec and be able to play it. That's why I have two questions: is there any alternative to EQ that I could use? Do I have to use it to make this build effective? 2. Is this build good for hardcore. Can it play end game content? Thanks!