[2.6] Trinity - Blade Flurry [Corrupted Energy] [523 kDPS] [Shaper Down]



Introduction

What makes a good build? I do not know. But I like synergy and well rounded builds. It feels bad picking up strength nodes, when playing a Chaos Inoculation caster. It feels bad having "increased cast speed" on an unique you need, when playing a melee attacker. It feels good, when everything fits together and any passiv node and any item modifier forfills a purpose for your build. Tinkering your own build. That is the most fun of playing PoE. This is my frist build I want to share with you. Have fun and feel free to leave comments and give suggestions.

Why Trinity? Because this character uses Life, Energy Shield and Mana as one big health pool.

________________________________________________________________________________
1. Core idea
Spoiler
I wanted to create a build, that evolves around the idea of utilising all three resources (life, engery shield and mana) as one health pool. Thankfully there is the notable passive "Mind over Matter" in the skill tree.

With this concept in mind, I needed to find an elegant way of regaining / regenerating those resources. Here is my result:

Life: "Life Gain on Hit" via claws (+Life on hit implicit)

Engery Shield: "Life Leech" transforms into "Energy shield Leech" via the notable passive Ghost Reaver and Vaal Pact for leeching energy shield instantly.

Mana: "Mana Leech" and "Mana Regeneration"

The "leech" part scales with the characters DPS. The "on hit" part scales with APS, which also pushes your damage per second. Therefore dual wielding (10% more Attack Speed) claws seems the optimal setting.

Finally the Corrupted Engery jewel is perfect for this concept of the three colored health pool.


Without Corrupted Energy chaos damaging hits only affect your life and mana. Physical damaging hits would lower your engery shield first and the "Mind over Matter" effect only occurs when taking life damage.

Corrupted Energy circumvents those problems. All damage from physical and chaos damaging hits is split between life, engery shield and mana. This gives your character the opportunity to benefit from "leech" and "on hit" at the same time.

________________________________________________________________________________
2. Weaknesses
Spoiler
Every ethical build has weaknesses:

Elemental Damage, Poison Clouds and Traps: Corrupted Energy has sadly no effect on elemental damaging hits and damage applied over time. On top of it your armour is very low.

Gearing: Corrupted Energy needs five corrupted Items to be equipped (jewels do not count). This makes the gearing process quite hard. Also balancing your elemental resistances is not easy. When you want to pick Trinity Blade Flurry as a league starter build, you are also starting a long journey of different gearing milestones.

Hardcore: Your health pool flickers a lot. I died often with this build. But i think with every new build idea a learning process is included. In the end the hardcore players should decide, if Trinity Blade Flurry is hardcore viable or not.

Map modifiers: Do not run reflect damage modifier and "Cannot Leech Life from Monsters". I also reroll "Cursed with Temporal Chains", because your attack per second is important for sustaining your life. "Patches of desecrated ground" are also quite harmfull. You will not have "Elemental Weakness" cap. Therefore watch out for this Curse and do not run the map with more than one other increased elemental damage modifier.

________________________________________________________________________________
3. The HoWA and Shaper's Touch synergy
Spoiler
I have to start with a short claw discussion: The reason why this build has to include claws is already mentioned. But which claws? To me there are three options.

Hand of Wisdom and Action: The notable passives "Mind over Matter", "Ghost Reaver" and "Vaal Pact" are located at the intelligence/dexterity area of the skill tree. With HoWA those attributes give you some attack speed (more Life on Hit) and damage (more Life Leech). Moreover HoWA has an Imperial Claw base, which gives +46 life on hit.

Rive: Rive does also have a nice synergy with intelligence/dexterity. But Rive does not increase those attributes. Moreover HoWA has slightly better attack speed and is an Imperial Claw (+ Life on Hit). It would be needed to run "Life Gain on Hit Support" in your sixlink, when using Rive.

Essentia Sanguis: This claw has good attack speed, gives flat energy shield and has a built in "Ghost Reaver" effect. Sadly GGG changed the itembase from Eye Gouger (+ Life on Hit) to Vaal Claw (+ Life Leech) in 2.6. I would probably run it with "Life Gain on Hit Support" in my link setup.

As you guess correctly, I decided to use HoWA. This claw in both hands increases your intelligence and dexterity and opens a great synergy with Shaper's Touch to make your attributes more valuable. You aim for high intelligence and good dexterity.

Dexterity gives: Flat Accuracy, Evasion, Attack Speed, Flat Life and Melee Physical Damage.
Intelligence gives: Flat Mana, Energy Shield, Lightning Damage to Attacks, Accuracy, Evasion
Strength gives: Flat Life, Melee Physical Damage. Flat Mana, Energy Shield

Here are some statistics:
At the moment my character has 734 intelligence, 237 dexterity and 123 strength. When equipping Shaper's Touch my life goes up by 151, my energy shield goes up by 526 (only 74 from Shaper's Touch itself), my mana goes up by 126 and my evasion rating goes up by 2821 (Shaper's Touch is ES/AR-Base).

________________________________________________________________________________
4. Ascendancy class
Spoiler
This is a short chapter. I recomend to run Sadow/Trickster or Ranger/Raider. Trickster has an higher health pool and Raider is able to regain / regenerate his health pool faster, because of better attack speed and damage. I took Raider. Offence is the best form of defence – right?

________________________________________________________________________________
5. Skill Tree

________________________________________________________________________________
6. Items & Gems
Spoiler

6.1 Body Armour & Attack Skill
Spoiler
A short skill discussion: I decided to pick Blade Flurry because of the 60% more Attack Speed for sustaining my life pool via "Life on Hit". Maybe Cyclone (50% more Attack Speed) would be a good pick too, but Blade Flurry with good increased Area of Effect transforms this build in some kind of range build. Blade Flurry seems to be made for the core idea behind Trinity Blade Flurry.

Carcass Jack is a good option. It gives life, helps a little bit reaching elemental resistance cap and is an evasion energy shield hybrid. And it increased the range of Blade Flurry. And it increases the damage. And it gives extra gore. No modifier is useless.

____________________________________________________________________________
6.2 Helmet & Auras
Spoiler
The Vertex Vaal Mask makes it possible to run two auras and still have enough mana left for the "Mind over Matter" effect. Your mana pool should be 30% of your life pool. Currently my character has 4169 life and 921 mana after reservation (running Discipline everytime plus another 50% aura). My mana pool should be 1250 after reservation. Maybe a level 4 Enlighten Support can fix that problem, because the Vertex Vaal Mask pushes it to level 5. You understand why this helm is needed? The chaos resistance is nice too.



For defence reasons I run Grace (43% chance to evade attacks jumps up to 60%).
For offence reasons I run Wrath.

____________________________________________________________________________
6.3 Gloves & Cast when Damage Taken
Spoiler
Beside the fact this build utilises the HoWA and Shaper's Touch synergy – there is nothing special here. I recommend to vaal your Shaper's Touch, because they are not expensive. But first link and roll colours.

____________________________________________________________________________
6.4 Hands & Movement
Spoiler
In my three links I run Whirling Blades and vaal auras (Vaal Grace, Vaal Haste). You can take Vaal Discipline, but I think Grace is better for avoiding the next damage after taking a big hit. This gives you time to replenish your health pool. Vaal Haste helps you replenishing it.

____________________________________________________________________________
6.5 Boots & Curse
Spoiler
I dislike cursing my targets manually. Therefore I run a second cast when damage taken setup. This build uses two curses: Enfeeble and Poacher's Mark.

● Poacher's Mark increases your "Life gain on Hit" by +24 (this is 50% more).
● Poacher's Mark makes your flasks refill faster.
● Poacher's Mark let mosters hit them, when you really need to hit them to refill your health pool.
● Poacher's Mark is an underrated curse.

For increasing your damage, you can swap Enfeeble with Conductivity (same colour).



Trinity Blade Flurry is very fast. There is no need for "increased Movement Speed" on your boots. But I like having good movement speed. Instead of movement speed you can aim for high base evasion rating and engery shield on boots. Your Boots should have an intelligence modifier. And vaal your boots! Maybe you are lucky and get +1 frenzy charge.

Shaper:
You can not rely on applying curses with cast when damage taken when it comes to Shaper. Therefore I recommend a curse on hit / orb of storm setup. Because of colours i change my goves to:



____________________________________________________________________________
6.6 Jewels
Spoiler
Corrupted Energy is an core item for this build. You also should take one Fertile Mind to swap some dexterity into intelligence. Put it in the slot next to Fervour.

There are three "open" slots for jewels. Use them for reaching resistance cap and increasing your life and energy shield pool.




____________________________________________________________________________
6.7 Accessories
Spoiler
This is getting a little bit tricky. You need three corupted items in your slots for your Corrupted Energy. And because of the fact amulets can have +1 Curse, I wanted to take advantage of that synergy and run two curses. And curses are strong – right?

I would like to descripe the gearing process in few steps:

1. Step: Use a vaaled Doedre's Damning and a Breach Ring. As long you do not have a second good amulet in backup, vaal your belt. As long as you do not have a second good belt in backup, vaal your amulet. When you do not have a backup amulet or belt, buy an amulet and vaal it.

2. Step: Buy a corrupted Astramentis and replace your amulet. Those attribute points are great for the HoWA and Shaper's Touch synergy.

3. Step: Farm currency and have a poe.trade lifesearch for amulets running. Buy amulets and vaal them. When you hit the jackpot (+1 curse), replace the Doedre's Damning with a second Breach Ring and the Astramentis with your new +1 curse amulet.

4. Step: As soon as you reach level 95 you pick up Whispers of Doom in the tree and then replace your +1 curse amulet again with your corrupted Astramentis. The synergy between Astramentis and Shaper's Touch is worth it.

Of course you can skip step two or just run one curse the whole time. But why give away a free curse, when you have to corrupt five items anyway?

Overall you want intelligence, flat life, flat energy shield, flat mana and some elemental resistances modifiers on your accessories. The belt should have flat strength and "increased Elemental Damage with Weapons".


____________________________________________________________________________
6.8 Flasks
Spoiler
Vessel of Vinktar: Take a Vinktar with lightning penetration. This flask is sadly to good. It lets you run "Elemental Focus Support" in your attack setup and ... and ... and ... I hope GGG will nerf it. I will run Atziri's Promise instead, to get a feeling for a nerfed Vinktar.

Silver Flask: It makes your character immune to freeze, shock and ignite because of "Quartz Infusion" and "Avatar of the Veil" from the Raider Ascendancy. And the "Onslaught" effect gives you important attack speed.

Life Flask: Life Flaks are stong for survivability. Make it "Bubbling" or "Saturated" and use it.

The Wise Oak: Lightning resistance should be your highest. This flask ist offence and defence at the same time.

Quicksilver: I like movement speed. You can swap Quicksilver with Stibnite (great defence) or Atziri's Promise. It is really up to you.



____________________________________________________________________________
6.9 Late Game Gear
Spoiler

This is my Gear for lategame:



________________________________________________________________________________
7. DPS-Calculation & Defences
Spoiler
DPS Calculation:
The Blade Flurry Tooltip for average Damage ist not correct. Here are my Path of Buildung calculations.

Effective DPS - 6 Stages


Effective DPS - 6 Stages + Flasks


Defences



________________________________________________________________________________
8. Videos

________________________________________________________________________________
9. Critcal analysis
Spoiler
There is no double-dipping? Yes, eh no. Would it be better to get rid of the evasion/energy shield hybid part and go ony energy shield instead? Maybe. Would it be better to get rid of the concept having a health pool combined out of life, energy shield and mana and go only energy shield instead? Yes.

To me the core idea behind the build sound interesting. And for sure the build is not finalised yet. The common "Shaperkill-Demonstration-Video" to verify the true Power of Exile is missing. In fact I have not killed Shaper with this build, yet. Status: Work in progress.


● Feel free to leave comments and give suggestions.
● Thanks for reading.
Last edited by Ralli on Apr 15, 2017, 9:06:25 AM
Last bumped on May 23, 2017, 11:16:30 AM
I felt the need to sign in to point out some quite major flaws.

Your inital concept would be better served using a solaris chest piece so chaos damage does not pass es at all.

your tree is all over the shop, while pathing is quite efficient I guess, you have too little of everything you are trying to do.

136% life and 85% es with little to none on your gear is pretty poor. Pick 2 defensive set up's (not MoM and ES) and go from there.


Lastly the damage nodes you take are pretty much like the rest of the tree, all over the shop.

Hi Tysontk,

and thanks for ur comment.

"
Tysontk wrote:

Your inital concept would be better served using a solaris chest piece so chaos damage does not pass es at all.


The initial concept of the build is having a health pool of comined ES/Life/Mana. In the current state of the game, going CI (full ES) without MoM and with Solaris / Shav would be definitely better - u are right. But this build would transfer immediately into a "boring" high ES-Build and would loose it's identity.

Having chaos hits not bypass ES (and physical hits too) would be a cruel design flaw. The reason is already explained.

But I am still not sure, if this build carries to the lategame. I have to test it - and mybe swap to CI oO
The problem with going for an EHP of all 3 pools is that you need to scale all 3, making the build very inefficient by definition, which is the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve. That's the reason why every single build out there focuses on 1 pool as its EHP which isn't mana as MoM only takes 30% of the damage to mana. Now, MoM builds do scale their mana pools, but as a secondary pool not an entwined primary pool, and even after the latest buff to MoM and the additional mana nodes it's still significantly worst than ES so only a few life builds really make use of MoM because life builds need all the help they can get compared to ES builds(CI or LL).

Thus when it comes to efficiency you should look at damage and gem slots rather than EHP and depending on your skill tree decide whether you need to go life(if you focus on the bottom part of the tree for your damage, utility and defenses) or can afford to go CI/LL. A lot of builds have been made efficient by going with attribute scaling items much like you've done with HoWA, so that's certainly a strong path to go. Alternatives are Brutus Lead Sprinklers(strength scaling), Whispering Ice(alternative int scaling), Iron Commander Siege Ballista(dex scaling for more totems) and slightly differently Righteous Fire Chieftain/Juggernaut(str stacking for damage with Doon Cuebiyari and typically Iron Will support too, and of course the natural hp you get from str). LL(low life) builds are also extremely efficient in that they maximize the usage of the 2 lesser pools(health and mana, with ES being the primary pool in their case) to stack twice the auras of other builds(since you stack on both your life pool and mana pool rather than just mana pool) with the added bonus of being able to use Pain Attunement for a massive 30% more spell damage which is good amazing for any spell based build.

Another direction to think about when it comes to efficiency is damage type and resistances. For example a Doomfletch Prism build stacks physical damage to basically triple dip by getting 110% extra bow physical damage as extra damage of 2 of the 3 elements so your say 1k damage becomes 3200 on paper: 1k phys+1.1k element+1.1k another element. On the complete opposite spectrum lay most builds, which rely on just a single damage source in order to maximize its stacking. In the case of elemental damage it also helps you negate monster resistance to it, so you rather go 100% cold/fire/lightning rather than 50% cold/50% fire for example since than you need to lower 2 different resistances rather than just 1. In the case of poison it's all about the double dipping and pure physical(though pretty rare these days) mostly so you can get both poison and bleed going from the physical damage output thus prioritizing the highest possible tool tip damage to maximize the DoTs.
"
OwlRaider wrote:
The problem with going for an EHP of all 3 pools is that you need to scale all 3, making the build very inefficient by definition, which is the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve. That's the reason why every single build out there focuses on 1 pool as its EHP which isn't mana as MoM only takes 30% of the damage to mana. Now, MoM builds do scale their mana pools, but as a secondary pool not an entwined primary pool, and even after the latest buff to MoM and the additional mana nodes it's still significantly worst than ES so only a few life builds really make use of MoM because life builds need all the help they can get compared to ES builds(CI or LL).

Thus when it comes to efficiency you should look at damage and gem slots rather than EHP and depending on your skill tree decide whether you need to go life(if you focus on the bottom part of the tree for your damage, utility and defenses) or can afford to go CI/LL. A lot of builds have been made efficient by going with attribute scaling items much like you've done with HoWA, so that's certainly a strong path to go. Alternatives are Brutus Lead Sprinklers(strength scaling), Whispering Ice(alternative int scaling), Iron Commander Siege Ballista(dex scaling for more totems) and slightly differently Righteous Fire Chieftain/Juggernaut(str stacking for damage with Doon Cuebiyari and typically Iron Will support too, and of course the natural hp you get from str). LL(low life) builds are also extremely efficient in that they maximize the usage of the 2 lesser pools(health and mana, with ES being the primary pool in their case) to stack twice the auras of other builds(since you stack on both your life pool and mana pool rather than just mana pool) with the added bonus of being able to use Pain Attunement for a massive 30% more spell damage which is good amazing for any spell based build.

Another direction to think about when it comes to efficiency is damage type and resistances. For example a Doomfletch Prism build stacks physical damage to basically triple dip by getting 110% extra bow physical damage as extra damage of 2 of the 3 elements so your say 1k damage becomes 3200 on paper: 1k phys+1.1k element+1.1k another element. On the complete opposite spectrum lay most builds, which rely on just a single damage source in order to maximize its stacking. In the case of elemental damage it also helps you negate monster resistance to it, so you rather go 100% cold/fire/lightning rather than 50% cold/50% fire for example since than you need to lower 2 different resistances rather than just 1. In the case of poison it's all about the double dipping and pure physical(though pretty rare these days) mostly so you can get both poison and bleed going from the physical damage output thus prioritizing the highest possible tool tip damage to maximize the DoTs.


Hi OwlRaider,

thanks for long statement. I agree in a lot of points. To sum it up:

There are "stronger" builds out there (why always people feel the need to address this fact?). I look at Trinity BF as a (maybe?) "hypster build" with nice mechanic synergy - nothing is worthless (Str,Dex,Int,In,Mana,ES,Evasion,Life on Hit,Mana on Hit,Leech...).

On top of it, you can do all content of the game with it (relatively easy).

Cheers
Last edited by Ralli on Apr 16, 2017, 4:05:40 AM
hi. thank you for making this guide. i really like this unconventional build. seems interesting. im kinda new to this game. can u please give leveling tips and which bandits did u take? thank you
"
malivodkaxiv wrote:
hi. thank you for making this guide. i really like this unconventional build. seems interesting. im kinda new to this game. can u please give leveling tips and which bandits did u take? thank you


Hi, Vodka ^^

Leveling is easy. Reach LvL 22 and put 2 Hand of Thought and Motion in your hands. Then later put Fertile Mind in your ClassSlot to change dex into int.

Bandits:
I took Life/AttackSpeed/Frenzy

Hope you enjoy it. I will play it in 3.0 aswell - should not be hard-nerfed.

Report Forum Post

Report Account:

Report Type

Additional Info