[3.1] Balls everywhere! Dual Grelwood Shank Molten Strike Gladiator

The playstyle is WHL: Whirl - Hit - Loot

We use Whirling Blades linked to faster Attacks, Blood Magic and Fortify to move around as well as to charge into groups. When you are in the group you hit with your Molten Strike. Depending on your Equip, a single mouse click will release up to 42 balls. In 99% of the cases, this single attack kills the whole group.

Due to the special mechanics of some of our items, you will have a nice defense while standing still (attacking).

Pro
- Safe (6k+ life, 36% hit AND spell block, good leech, 90% phys reduction with 2 flasks)
- Very good group damage and clearspeed
- Atziri / Uber lab / Elder viable, probably even Shaper
- Can do all maps including Guardians
- Can do almost all map mods (except no leech and probably ele reflect)
- HC viable (though I never played much HC, so others might judge if this is true)
- Very cheap, you can start mapping with a 5L and 1c items in every slot
- Uber Lab Ascendancy not necessary for the build to shine

Con
- If you have a potato PC you will have lags due to the massive amount of magma balls
- Melee build
- Won´t reach the top DPS or meta build level

Tree Short Link: http://poeurl.com/bIfR

Full Tree Link:

Ascendancy
There are only three mandatory Ascendancy Keystones:
1. Outmatch and Outlast
2. Painforged
3. Versatile Combatant
(4. Gratuitous Violence)

The 4th Ascendancy is not that relevant since both options won´t be much of a buff.

Bandits
Kill all of them. None of the bandit buffs are good enough to sacrifice 2 skillpoints for them.

https://pastebin.com/SGABaEmM

This link shows the tree on Lv 89 as well as my current equipment. Please note that PoB can´t calculate the damage correctly since it only shows the damage of the melee part as well as one ball.

The damage should be somewhere around 500k+ in groups and a little less on single traget.

Main Attack in 6L Body: Molten Strike - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Multistrike - Ancestral Call - Elemental Focus - Physical Projectile Attack Damage

For single target like Atziri, Shaper, ... switch from Ancestral Call to Fire Penetration.

Movement in 4L: Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks - Fortify - Blood Magic

Culling Leap & Totem in 4L : Ancestral Protector - Leap Slam - Melee Physical Damage - Culling Strike

Curse & Trigger in 4L: Vengeance - Life Gain on Hit - Curse on Hit - Flammability

CwDT in 3L: CwDT Lv 11 - Immortal Call Lv 13 - Increased Duration Lv 20

Auras + Golem in 3S: Flame Golem + Herald of Ash + Hatred


Quality Priority: Molten Strike > Whirling Blades > Herald of Ash > Main Damage Supports > Rest

If you prefer you can also link Flammability to CwDT and use other support gems in your Vengeance setup.

THE SKILL
Molten Strike is a skill that consists of two parts.
Part 1: A melee hit that targets a single enemy and converts 60% of phys damage to fire.
Part 2: A number of Magma Balls that erupt from the target and spread across the screen, hitting for 60% fire / 40% phys aoe damage.

The balls can overlap, means that two balls from a single melee hit can hit the same enemy twice. The more balls we get, the more damage a single attack can do.


THE BALL SCALING
This build relies on two items that we use two times each to get a higher number of balls:


The base number of balls is 3, with those items you get 11 balls with a single hit. Since we also use the new support gem Ancestral Call, we hit three times with a single attack so we get 33 instead of 11 balls.

Since we hit more than once per second, we can get hundreds of balls. With my current char lv 85 I have more than 300 balls per second active!


WHY GRELWOOD SHANK? IT HAS ONLY 300 DPS
There are several reasons why we use this sword. When you take a look at the sword, you see it has four very special mods.
Nr. 1: 80% increased Armour while stationary 80% increased armour is a lot! Since we dual wield the swords, we get 160% increased armour. This helps a lot with tanking smaller hit.
Nr. 2: 2 additional Projectiles if you've been Hit Recently Everytime we receive a hit, we get 3x4 additional balls per hit for 4 seconds. This means we want to get hit a lot while not receiving much damage. To achieve this, we don´t want to dodge hits but only block them. A blocked hit still counts as a hit, so even a hit with zero damage gives us additional balls.
Nr. 3: Iron Reflexes while stationary Iron Reflexes helps us to achieve a very low dogde chance. As soon as we stand still (= attack) all of our evasion will be converted into armour! This means there is no dodge chance from evasion and it also means we get more base armour to profit from the massive 160% increased armour mods.
Nr. 4: Point Blank While you have Point Blank, you do 50% more damage to projectiles at the start of their movement. This will apply to all projectiles, since they move only for a few inches each.

All in all you will get:
- more damage due to Point Blank
- more defense due to 160% increased armour
- more damage due to more projectiles (12 per hit!)
- four more skillpoints that you save because you dont have to take point blank and iron reflexes

Another good point: Since the weapon is quite cheap, you can try to vaal it until you get some nice mods like culling, 3 to 6% block chance or weapon range.

Additionally the weapon has a very high attack speed, what really helps with clear speed and with encounters where you have to dodge a lot.

OFFENSE:
~10 attacks per second with 8k per hit each releasing 33 balls which each hit for about 6.500 damage

DPS is hard to calculate on Molten Strike but it should be somewhere around 500 to 700k on groups with a total investment of 1C per item + 6L chest.

DEFENSE:
- 6k+ life
- 36% block chance for spells and hits, even more with the right corruption on our weapons
- 90% phys reduction with flasks aktive
- 76/75/75 res
- Almost 3k life leech on hit rate
- Fortify

BUILD-ENABLING UNIQUES:



These 2x2 items are the mandatory items in this build. They are available for 1C each, for good rolls on the Shank you might need to wait a little. I bought mine for 1c each.

OTHER NICE UNIQUES:
Belly of the Beast - Not much to say about it, you know it :)
The Brine Crown - This item has very nice synergy with our swords since it gives 800 armour while stationary. With the 160% bonus from swords, this item alone gives more than 4.000 armour.
Xoph's Heart / Xoph's Blood - Both amulets give a very nice buff to our damage ("enemies covered in ash"), Blood even helps with res penetration and the additional life is also very nice. This one is rather expensive so consider it a nice to have item or endgame upgrade.
Kaom's Roots - Good buff to our Life, unwavering Stance also helps. Try to get a +1 frenzy corruption.

RARE ITEMS:
Just try to fill in life, resistances and get as much armour as possible. If you don´t use Kaoms Roots you can use either pure Armour or Armour/Evasion items. This is my equip at level 85, didnt pay more than 3c for any item (except the 6L Chest which was 60C):



MODS TO LOOK FOR - OFFENSE:
Increased Attack Speed
Flat Phys Damage
Flat Fire Damage
%Fire Damage
%Phys Damage

MODS TO LOOK FOR - DEFENSE:
Life
Resistance
Flat Armour
Reduced Flask Charges used

So far I did ~50/150 maps on the Atlas, killed Merc Izaro, Atziri and Elder + Guardians on T6 to T8.

I did not die even once on a map. I did all guardians + Elder deathless without reading a guide.

I died once on the Atziri Trio because I always mess up the order. I died to the bleed.

The build feels very good, defense and offense-wise. The clearspeed is great.