[3.0] SMTS: The Knife Launcher: Tri-Totem Ethereal Knives [Atziri] [Uber Lab]

Normal Lab: Ngamahu, Flames Advance. This is a pathing node, but the extra chance to ignite and burn damage is useful.
Cruel Lab: Hinekora, Death's Fury. Totems can leech for you and fire penetration? Sign me up!
Merciless Lab: Aromongul, Moon's Presence. Extra damage to enemies and reduced damage done by enemies.
Uber Lab: Tukohama, War's Herald. Reflect immune totems + Taunt. Sounds good!

Weapon: Roth’s Reach Recurve Bow
Using Roth’s Reach with Ethereal Knives isn’t that new of a concept. But we’re using it in our totem build for the reasons it has been used by others. Free +1 Chain. It’s the best bow we can pair with the Signal Fire for full Fire conversion. For extra fun, get a bunch of these cheaply and corrupt them until you get Culling Strike. Now you’re getting two free links off your bow.

Quiver: Blackgleam Fire Arrow Quiver
Quiver: The Signal Fire Fire Arrow Quiver
You can start out with the Blackgleam Fire Arrow Quiver. It does the job of doing 50% fire conversion for you. When you can afford The Signal Fire, however, you should do so (or if you manage to snag the prophecy for changing a Blackgleam to The Signal Fire). The Signal Fire gives us 25%-35% of our physical damage as extra fire damage, which is quite a good chunk of damage.

Chest: Soul Mantle Spidersilk Robe
This is an Energy Shield-based chest armour, which is unfortunate, but it provides us with two key things for this build. It provides us a third totem and it lets us curse ourselves (via dying or expiring totems). It also supports all gems in it with a level 20 Spell Totem. This is where Ethereal Knives will be socketed Pick one up today for dirt cheap (1 Chaos or less). Then socket and link it (4 Link suggested) yourself.

Ring Slot #1 and Ring Slot #2: Kikazaru Topaz Ring
This is where you will start to see the synergy of the build come together. The Kikazaru Topaz Ring is a Unique Ring which grants us all sorts of useful bonuses for our build. It gives us mana regeneration (very useful), decent flat life regeneration, Lightning Resistance, and 10-15 to all attributes. Those are all excellent and useful things to us. However, the main draw of the ring is that it provides 40% Reduced Impact of Curses on us. You're going to be cursing yourself a lot thanks to the Soul Mantle. Reducing that impact is huge and wearing a pair of these allows us to remain Resistance Capped. They are also ridiculously cheap. Pay more than a Chaos and you're paying too much.

With the buff to 40% per ring, you can get 80% resistance to curses wearing two of these. This makes pretty much every single curse laughable. You can consider curses on maps to be free mods.

Self-Flagellation Viridian Jewel
And here is where the synergy takes hold. 10-20% Increased Damage for every curse that you have means that all the curses you're putting on yourself with Soul Mantle are boosting your DPS. This jewel will take care of a lot of our DPS needs. And, like everything else, it is quite cheap. A chaos or so should get you a good one.

Clear Mind Cobalt Jewel
We want to keep as much mana as possible available to us. So we don’t use any auras in this build. Clear Mind gives us DPS and mana regeneration for not using auras. A well-rolled one will set you back a few chaos, but you can buy one for as little as one Alchemy Orb as a starter.

Ring of Blades Viridian Jewel
This jewel boosts our physical damage (which is converted later to fire) and it gives us our five additional projectiles. It also turns Ethereal Knives into a nova attack. This is a cheap jewel that is easy to find.

Ngamahu Tiki Coral Amulet
This is an option amulet if you have the resistances covered elsewhere. This is pure damage. Up to 70% increased damage is an amulet you should consider. It's certainly an end game option though. Costs around 10 chaos for a poorly rolled corrupted version and the price goes up from there. You can also buy the prophecy yourself and make it that way.

Impacted Slots: Helmet, Belt, Amulet, and Boots

Get rare items for these slots. Pack on as much Life and Resistance (including Chaos if possible) as you humanly can into these items. You are really going to need your Resistances pumped up on these. Your boots should have 25% Movement Speed or better. While you're going to be reducing the impact of Temporal Chains by 80%, if you don't have movement speed life is going to be pretty terrible.

You should be focusing on either Armour or Hybrid Armour/Energy Shield gear. We go nowhere near Evasion nodes but do pick up some incidental Armour boosters. Energy Shield, of course, adds to our effective hit point pool and makes coloring the sockets (a lot of blue gems are needed) much easier.
A Goldrim Leather Cap can be a good "Resistance Fixer" in the short term, but long term you will want to replace that with a better helmet.

You will also want some Dexterity on your gear. We do need Dexterity for our gems, so be ready to either craft some or make sure to buy some with a good bit of Dexterity on it.

I run three life flasks, a Lavianga's Spirit, and a Quicksilver flask. You will want a Staunching Flask. I have linked my flasks in my gear section.

This build doesn't cost much to start up. All our required uniques are cheap except Signal Fire, and you can substitute in Blackgleam for quite awhile.

You can ignore the linking on your bow and just link your Soul Mantle. That'll take some fusings and jewelers. Go for 6 sockets with your jewelers (make sure to Quality with Whetstones and Armourer's Scraps first!) then go for at least a 5 link. You have twice as many possibilities for a 5 link with a 6 socket, which is why you go for that first. Depending on your luck, this can be very expensive or very cheap. If you want to buy the 6 socket and focus on fusings, you can do that too, though it’ll cost you a little chaos.

I've found that Lavianga's Spirit is an excellent unique flask if you want fast and easy mana regeneration. This flask makes running no regeneration maps much easier, if you can get your hands on it. It can be a little pricey but it does open up another map mod for you. If you don't want to buy one of these, that's fine. Just run a Hybrid flask instead.

All in all, you can run this build pretty cheaply. But, like most builds, to really make it shine, you'll want to invest a bit of currency in it. Then the build does the job of clearing maps and getting you currency itself.

Your main skill is Ethereal Knives. It should be linked as follows:

4L: Ethereal Knives – Faster Casting – Controlled Destruction – Fire Penetration – (Soul Mantle Spell Totem)
5L: Ethereal Knives – Faster Casting – Controlled Destruction – Fire Penetration – Elemental Focus (Soul Mantle Spell Totem)
6L: Ethereal Knives – Faster Casting – Controlled Destruction – Fire Penetration – Elemental Focus – Added Fire Damage (Soul Mantle Spell Totem)

Ethereal Knives: We don’t care about igniting enemies. We just slaughter them with lots of high DPS projectiles. The links are all about damage. We have five gems socketed that increase our DPS. Spell Totem is provided by Soul Mantle. +1 Chain is provided by Roth’s Reach, increasing our pack clearing speed. If you corrupt your Roth’s Reach for Culling Strike, you’re killing things at 10% life or less instantly.

Iron Will: This build gets upwards of 300 strength. This gem is surprisingly strong as a result and can really help push your DPS upwards. Usable on Ethereal Knives and Flameblast.

3L: Cast When Damage Taken - Immortal Call - Summon Chaos Golem

This gives us some instant defense if we get hit with something hard (and serves as a warning bell). I found my golem dies a lot without a lot of minion supports, which is something we just don't do. Letting it be summoned when we take damage is one less thing you have to worry about and it's a tiny tradeoff in golem-boosted DPS. Totally a Quality of Life investment that I make every time.

Flame Dash: We're a fire build. This is a fire movement skill. It fits well. Use Lightning Warp if you hate this skill. Or Blink Arrow.

Decoy Totem: Keep enemies in a specific spot. Excellent in certain scenarios, plus it is a red gem, so it's easy for us to slot. Not useful once you get totems that taunt though.

Rallying Cry: Used to make Mind Over Matter more easily sustainable. Downside: it overrides your taunting totems. I used it for about 80 levels and found it more hassle than it's worth. Hook yourself up with a couple of Spirited Response jewels if you go with this gem though.

Portal: I hate hauling portal scrolls. Totally optional.

One of the biggest concerns that letting yourself be cursed so much is really the drop in your elemental resistances. These are level 20 curses. That means you're cursing yourself with Level 20 Elemental Weakness (39% of Resistances gone) and Level 20 Frostbite, Flammability, and Conductivity (44% of their respective elemental resistance gone). Without mitigation, you could be looking at 83% of your Elemental Resistances being cut away, which is a rather difficult number to overcome.

The Kikazaru Topaz Ring, however, drops the curse impact by 40%. Two of them drop it by 80%. That means Elemental Weakness now hits you for -7.8% and the other three hit you for -8.8%. Because of PoE's rounding system, that comes out to -7% and -8%, for a more reasonable -15% to each resist. That is a number you can make up with a focus on resistances on your gear.

This makes your Merciless Resistance Goal 150% instead of the standard 135% total resistances. The planned tree, you will notice, puts you very close to two sets of resistance wheels: The Scion southern start (Sentinel for 10% all and individual 18% nodes) and the Diamond Skin wheel (15% all and 12% individual). These should be used as crutches until your gear catches up. As you improve your gear, you can spec out of these wheels and invest in other nodes. You get 20 free respec points throughout the story and Orbs of Regret aren't too hard to get a hold of. Use them, don't hoard them.

This also makes the impact of other curses extremely light. Light enough that we just don’t care. Seriously, we barely feel the impact of being cursed with anything. Except when we get with Silence. That pretty much locks us up, but Silence is not very common in the game, so we don't bother to plan for it.