[2.3] SHIELD CHARGE CoC CI Poison Bladefall - End Game Viable - Tower of Destruction

In 2.3, Shield Charge became an AoE. This was the most important missing piece from it being viable as a primary ability. After a great deal of testing, it turns out it's also great at cast on crit. Can do all map mods other than physical reflect and blood magic. You can't Physical to Lightning your way into safety with this build so far as I can tell.

Quick Summary:

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This build is strongly inspired by two existing builds: BOOM BOOM poison mines and Queen of Blades. Queen of Blades as Scion is mostly dead, given the Scion nerfs. BOOM BOOM poison mines is still amazing, but sometimes you want to get up into things faces and still do tons of damage.

This has elements of both, yet uses shield charge for almost flicker strike like movement that you can control. Gems are somewhat a matter of personal preference, though if you decide to avoid poison you'll want to slightly adjust the tree to remove passives specific to damage over time.

Tested in a party setting with 2 other party members, 90+. LA BR and Discharge. This kept up with and/or outpaced both, depending on map mods.



Mechanics
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There isn't much to say here. It's cast on crit. You want your critical strike chance as high as possible. We'll use a Vagan dagger to ensure crit chance is as high as it possible can be. You'll be attacking with shield charge > 4 times a second. It uses the trickster ascendancy to remove all mana cost for these attacks.

The one key to using shield charge well for a CoC build is to learn to keep your mouse cursor at your feet when you want to burst dps. This causes it to fire as fast as it possible can.

For uber ascendancy, I'd recommend the frenzy charge nodes to flesh out Trickster.



Videos:

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Ignore my poor skills. This is just a demonstration of how the build looks, feels, plays.

Gorge, Twinned and other mods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXlDACe48vA



Gear (My Current Gear provided as a guideline, this isn't a budget build, but also not an item showcase build):

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Flasks:



Mana pot is only there for staunching. You could replace a Rumi's with another Taste of Hate, or Atziri's...Tweak away.

Required items for full strength are Heretic's Veil and Skyforth. Else you have to replace Concentrated Effect with Power Charge on Critical or find some other way to gen power charges reliably. Heretic's Veil is easier to do without by dropping a Herald.



Gems and Links:

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6L Chest

Shield Charge -> Cast on Critical Strike Support -> Increased Critical Strikes Support -> Bladefall -> Concentrated Effect -> Poison / Ethereal Knives / Faster Attacks (for hilarity and fastest possible map clear before boss)

Helm

If using Heretics Veil:

Warlord's Mark, Vulnerability, Optional Enlighten (needed for full aura/curse setup however)

If not using Heretics Veil:

Blasphemy -> Warlord's Mark, Vulnerability, Optional Engligthen (you've already lost Herald of Ash, more optional than before)

Shield:

Cast when Damage Taken -> Increased Duration -> Immortal Call

Boots:

Spell Totem Support -> Wither -> Faster Casting (this is optional, but will help with tanky bosses)

You'll notice in my gear I don't even have this. I was messing around with multiple CWDT triggers for laughs.

Gloves:

Discipline, Herald of Ash, Optional Enlighten (needed to have 2 curses + Herald of Ash active, which only works if you have Veil)



Jewels:

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It uses 5 jewels, though you can get by with 2. The 2 required are Energy Within (in its usual location between Shadow and Witch near Life/ES wheel), and Efficient Training (in Witch center top, next to Power Charge bridge).

The other 3 jewels are used to further increase attack speed. You can get 13% per jewel alongside 2 other benefits. 11% jewels are easier to come by.



Leveling:

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I'll provide leveling trees with an edit. It levels easily as self cast Bladefall. I'm actually doing it in Prophecy now, though I went with the Assassin Ascendancy to start as I just won't have the gems or items to support the final version early enough. But you don't have to do that. In fact, that may have been a mistake on my part. Not needing any mana for Cyclone would have made it easier to have curses up...



Passive Tree:



Bandits:

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Normal: Kill
Cruel: Kill
Merciless: Alira



Credits:

Kraiwen for this build, https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1611726, Queen of Blades. One of my favorite builds from 2.2.

Madzak for this build, https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1633639, Boom Boom Mines. Great demonstration of poison / multiplier stacking.

Drew (I won't link his in game details until I have permission, but he knows who he is ;) ) for tons of theorycrafting conversations, thoughts, advice, and putting up with my rambling as it was coming together as always.
Last edited by UnleashedPoE on Jun 5, 2016, 12:54:25 PM
Last bumped on Aug 28, 2016, 6:01:47 AM
Reserved, just in case.
It's everything I wanted to try this league, thanks! :)
Quite welcome! It's going to be my main build for the league as well. So strong/fast. :)
Hello, i am very interested in this build. How are you doin now?Is it good? I am leveling now with blade vortex and shield charge(for now is very very easy). How to level passive tree?What point did you get first?

Thanks in advance!!
very, very nice looking build. i might try this out with a 2 curses(assassin's mark) because well... theres 1 skyforth for sale in this league and its 21 ex. would that be possible? or what about some kind of power charge on crit spell. tbh though i wouldn't mind seeing how it compares to some shield charge coc discharge variant.
Last edited by goldnugget on Jun 7, 2016, 12:57:20 PM
^^ i havent looked through the gems in detail, but a couple of thoughts are cwdt, tempest shield, power charge on crit (pcoc) or cwdt, blade vortex, pcoc. You could also make that a 4l with both.
How do you keep up survivability? I'm a total wet noodle without my life leech gem, and even then it feels like ghost reaver/vaal pact has a long delay until I actually get my leech.
How is it now after the nerf?
Another thread/build on Standard, make it pls on Prophecy.
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