2.6 Brutus Sprinkler MS Zerker 72k / 140k DPS || EO and mob problems SOLVED! Videos inside

If you're here you're either thinking about building around Brutus' Lead Sprinklers, or you already have and are looking for new ideas to the problems the build faces. I have respec'd this build so many times, from Chieftain to Zerker, no Vaal Pact to Vaal Pact, and even tinkered with Geoffri's and Shaper Gloves for a higher EHP life pool. I honestly feel like this is the best version available because of three main reasons:

1. High sustain of Elemental Overload (EO) from two AOE spells linked to CWDT and Increased Critical Strikes.

2. Mob survivability from CWDT spells. Bladefall and Firestorm both linked to Iron Will to turn our Strength into additional DPS. This gives us the leech to survive those ranged hits, or when we're frozen and unable to attack.

3. High focus on damage mitigation by using a Lightning Coil (Legacy for me, but normal should be fine) and MoM on tree.

One of the biggest problems I, and probably you, faced when playing this build was dealing with ranged monsters, porcupines, and the time frame between when you attack and when the balls actually hit the enemy. I found the leveling from Normal to Merc Dried Lake to be a cake walk and thought the build was so busted and I would waltz right through maps up to Guardians, Shaper, and Uber Atziri........ until I got pasted Merc Dried Lake. Something happened, right around Malachai I started dying a lot more frequently, monsters were hitting harder, there were more of them, most of them were ranged, and I found myself dying even when I was able to leap slam into a pack because their attacks hit me before my balls could drop and leech. Below are my gear, gems, and explanations of why I feel like they fix the issues mentioned.

Special shout out to my buddy John (Delarage) who really put a lot of thought into this with me and gave some great suggestions on how to salvage an, what I considered at the time, unplayable build.

Gems/Links

DPS


Gear

Flasks

Skill tree

Leveling



Bandits/Ascendancy

What can't this build do?

Videos

Reserved

Your first paragraph perfectly describes my experience. I have respecced from chieftan and berzerker so many times trying to figure out something with this build. I will have to give your's a shot. Thanks for the post!

Simple solution you can use (and that I'm using on my own version):
Swap your fire pen for melee splash when clearing. You will one shot entire packs with the initial swings.

Also, I would recommend dropping faster attacks for conc effect (single target) / inc aoe (clearing).

You don't need to waste a bunch of slots for more CWDT :)

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Zigrivers72 wrote:

Your first paragraph perfectly describes my experience. I have respecced from chieftan and berzerker so many times trying to figure out something with this build. I will have to give your's a shot. Thanks for the post!

I have a feeling a lot of people feel this way. All the forum posts I was reading was only talking about DPS, but no one was really discussing how to stay alive to do that DPS. Let me know how it goes and if you find any improvements!

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zSavage wrote:

Simple solution you can use (and that I'm using on my own version):
Swap your fire pen for melee splash when clearing. You will one shot entire packs with the initial swings.

Also, I would recommend dropping faster attacks for conc effect (single target) / inc aoe (clearing).

You don't need to waste a bunch of slots for more CWDT :)

Great suggestions, I'll try melee splash for mapping.

Part of the reason I want the CWDT slots is to survive to get to the pack. We know we don't have trouble killing stuff once we can hit it, but we need to stay alive long enough to do so. We also don't really need the slots for anything else (at least IMO).

Optimized gear a bit further and added videos of Minotaur, Chimera, and breaches. Will continue uploading as I do content.

your life is very low. ive seen molten zerkers with 1400+ str and 7k+ life.

i didnt check ur passive tree in detail, but thats what i noticed on ur gear:

6L: conc eff/inc aoe instead of faster attacks

i would use these flasks: life, basalt, (legacy) toh, wise, quicksilver/silver and get freeze immune and bleed immune. toh is better than armor for mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppqfm3MUq7g
u can swap the quicksilver/silver for dying sun if ur leaping and not running for mapping. 2 projectiles and more aoe.
3 projectiles on helmet makes a big difference. when ur mapping with dying sun, 3 proj helmet and inc aoe in the 6L, u have 12 projectiles with 2 wildfire jewels. molten strike nearly feels like a ranged attack then. im curious what happens when i add melee splash to that setup^^

id definitely use fortify with leapslam. if u dont wanna run but leapslam around the maps id link it with blood magic in a 4 link (fastatt-leap-fortify-bloodmagic)

id put the cwdt firestorm/bladefall in 1 setup: like cwdt-firestorm-bladefall-ironwill

cwdt-ic is a must as well, u can use vortex or the golem in the cwdt as well. i think lightning golem provides more dmg than flame golem looking at the tooltip dps.

i wouldnt use devotos + lightning coil, but rares with life/str/res and u shouldnt use points for res in the tree then. u can get much more str/life.

ur rings are very budget. u should have life/str on every rare. 50+ str and 70-100+ life.

u should take arctic armour for even more dmg mitigation. u have only flammability+hoa. thats 60% mana reserved. if u add arctic armour ur @ 85%. if u use blood magic on leapslam its np.

blood rage and vaal haste are worth mentioning.

im playing molten zerker with ngahamus flame. brutus sprinkler has more potential, but is more expensive than the ngahamu version if u consider high end rare items. if u use the same budget ngahamus is tankier than brutus. if u use a lot of budget brutus is much stronger.

the ngahamu version im playing has less dmg, but more life. (60k unbuffed molten dmg @ 6 aps, but in comparison to blsp 20 firepen from the axe additionally. im at 7.7k life atm). i can facetank all guardians and ive never had problems to ranged enemies. im not even using a cwdt firestorm/bladefall setup. but i have more dmg mitigation and 7.7k life.

if u went the expensive and not the budget version u would see the real potential of brutus molten strike. well i know, not everyone has the currency to afford it (me neither), but if the gear was perfect, the zerker would rule everything.

this is the tree of a molten brutus player with ~ 1450 str and 7.1k life @ lvl 92, but hes playing the RT version: http://poeplanner.com/AAcAAPshCwB7xthYYz38jM_2SF8_FCDvDlBH5FHBBHloqW7AGm87eA218jWS2L134wHchNlHfr02ZU2-pxm0LYMVICzphrPdDVuvFHWkwod2Sn06s2eg459YrzbohmAirzhTducB56cwn8s6UryfGJEOPBRx-Ovz3Whl6hh2rM9-9zJ82XXL6mLZfIIH_o9N46ZXFE38S62N8kF311b6fyswfI19I_ZNkqOK-WOVzO0_FfAF-Zsm3UZjpxGBelNh6896lwYZisM6KjjEot-YYlqbtYTFJIsPqxa_JpVh4lVLjDbo1s3q_W5-3Xj5jbn4X1_QIZDqEL8IJDcW6ZhXAAAAAAA=

imho EO on ngamahu is worth it cause u neednt stack str like a madman. without RT u need at least 88% chance to hit imho. its really hard to get items with high accuracy, str, life and res... for the expensive brutus version EO is worth it, but otherwise its hard to get all mods and good mods on ur items. so the "real deal" brutus molten zerker would go for EO for maximum dmg, but it will cost alot.

btw its extremely expensive and unlikely to get but if u had a corrupted xoph's blood amulet with +1 to curses u can cast ele weakness manually in addition to flammability aura (only against big bosses ofc). shaper would melt like a snowball during summertime with that luxury setup! well, thats only theory...

well this is my opinion and im playing molten strike zerker 80% of this league :)
i had a lot of discussion going on in the other thread of the ngahamu zerker and thats where i wanna share some thoughts and my own experience.

however there are some things i like in ur build and i wanna try:
- the cwdt bladefall/firestorm setup although i dont die to trash looks rly cool, ill give it a try! it wont work as good on a ngahamu zerker, cause i have even less than 500 str, but ill try it at least.

btw i would really like to see a brutus molten zerker who invested dozens of exalts in action, but this person probably doesnt exist ^^

ok share ur thoughts with me :)

/edit: melee splash support doesnt work with molten strike, cause molten strike is already an aoe skill.

/edit2: path of building told me that atziri's disfavour = more dmg than ngahamus flame. adding the average molten burst dmg from ngahamus flame atziri's dmg is only slightly higher, but with atziri's the lifeleech is much better and the initial hit hits much harder.
path of building told me that added fire dmg sup = more effective dmg than fire pen sup except against guardians and shaper (dunno for uber atziri)!

Nice BLS variant.

You might want to know that the tooltip DPS is for the melee hit, but most of the molten strike damage comes from projectiles. Spiked gloves only affect the melee hit, not the projectiles, so they don't have that great of an effect on the total DPS. Gripped gloves would be better, even though they don't affect the tooltip.

Another thing you might want to know is that most (all?) skills roll accuracy and crit a single time per cast or attack. This means that each time CwDT procs bladefall or firestorm, it rolls a single crit value total. This means that either all of those hits from a single CwDT trigger will crit or none of them will (ignoring some details about lucky and unlucky hits). If you're going EO, your strategy of having multiple CwDT spells and using increased crit on both of them is still a good idea for sustaining it, but the AoE aspect doesn't improve the chances of critting.