[3.2] Hot Flashes - Flame Surge, Life based, Shatter Expectations

In order to automate everything and get the most out of our tree, we should understand how our ascendacy choices work.

First, consider our Ascendancy 'Beacon of Ruin'

This provides Elemental Proliferation, as well as enforcing two regimes that mechanically alter how our character functions. First, it removes the requirement of a damage threshold 'floor' in order for a cold or lightning based hit that succeeds in rolling a chill or shock ailment. This means that any hit of cold or lightning that is also going to chill or shock, now does so 100% of the time without considering the life or elemental resistance of the monster.
(Keep in mind that monster 'chance to avoid status ailments' still functions as normal, due to 'by at least' only removing the threshold for ailment.)

The Elementalist Ascendancy 'Elemancer' would grant us immunity to elemental ailments provided we control the corresponding golem out. There's not way to get that ascendancy and mastermind + Beacon, so I opted to get the best of both worlds by going for Crystal Skin, a very under-appreciated node cluster near Acrobatics.




Flame Surge cannot ignite targets. It does 50% More damage to targets that are ignited. It can cause other ailments, such as shock, if the character was able to shock with fire damage. Shaper of Desolation gives 6 seconds out of 14 able to ignite despite this limitation.


The life based version opts for maximum crit chance and multiplier, and Choir is a great addition to that. We utilize the lightning bolt trigger to help with igniting targets if they weren't already, and it's simply a great source of critical strike chance. Voice of the Storm works well here also, and I recommend you actually use voice over Choir while you're still going for stat points on tree.


The speed of clearing in this build is completely due to this chest piece. It not only causes enemies to explode for damage to nearby enemies, but it also 'carries' our elemental ailments to new targets in the process, which causes the chain reaction that is so satisfying in this build. Of special note, it also allows us to ignore shock avoidance when it comes to our ailment mitigation on tree and gearing. Finally, it gives increased damage if we have shocked recently (which is always) and it increases the effect of shock (which I choose to disregard in my calculations, so damage is mildly higher than I advertise).


Farrul's Bite is an awesome helm for a few reasons, but in our build we're looking for only two main points. It grants Aspect of the Cat, which regardless of which phase it is in grants us additional critical strike chance and damage. But it also has a 15% damage avoidance phase which is very nice. Additionally, it is a source of Blind in the build, which I am always in favor of adding into builds wherever possible.


This was a bit pricey, but allow me to explain it a bit. In the luxury section, one of the goals of the build is to someday own a Farrul's Fur (thereby removing the mana reservation cost for Aspect of the Cat). In that scenario, Grace is a stand-in and gets added to the build. Note that Grace does not provide any bonus during Uber Elder fight, as Unwavering Stance on Kaom's Roots kills all chance of evading an enemy attack. This shield improves quality of life with the socketed gems reserve less mana, and is vital to this future change. Most importantly however is at least 20% chance to avoid Elemental Ailments, as this combined with boots, gloves, jewels and tree grant us total immunity to becoming affected by these ailments. Any rare shield will do for our purposes, but since our primary source of defense comes from evasion, you will want to try to find one that has some.


The rest of the easy-to-acquire avoidance from ailments comes from boots, however by the time you are ready to face Uber Elder with this build you are going to switch into Kaom's Roots and will have to find ailment avoidance elsewhere.

Gloves are a final location for avoidance, but require Leo 4 to craft ignite, leo 7 to craft shock with. Hopefully you can sort your avoidance values with just jewels.

My gear at level 85:

Main Skill:

Flame Surge - Spell Echo - Immolate - Controlled Destruction
These four gems are your core, 'main' links and what you will use until you get a 5 or 6 link. Add an area gem for your fifth, and a final 'more' damage gem link or utility gem for your 6th link.


Concentrated Effect or Increased Area of Effect
For general mapping and clearing, Inc. AoE. Swap to Conc. Effect for bossing.


Hypothermia gives the best 'on paper' damage increase. We are chilling with cold damage on Herald of Ice, and Beacon guarantees that we always have a minimum of 10% chill on enemies. The 'more' mod here is just hard to beat.

Helm:
Max level The first three, but keep in mind the mana cost of Orb of Storms when leveling Arcane Surge. I ended up with a level 7 Arcane Surge to make sure that it would always trigger whenever I use the main skill. Farrul's Bite has energy shield, so it should be easy to roll 4 blue sockets.

Gloves:
Similar to the Orb of Storms setup, you have to watch the levels of gems in this. CwDT stays at 1, Immortal Call goes to 3, Tempest Shield goes to 7, and Increased Duration goes all the way to 20. This is one of the ways that we deal fire damage with spells that can ignite enemies for us, and it's pretty important to keep this CwDT at level 1 for maximum uptime on Tempest Shield. I chose to go with Armour/Evasion glove bases so that 3 red sockets and 1 blue is easy enough to do.

Shield:
You won't be able to turn on Grace and both Heralds for most of the time, however if particularly difficult content shows up feel free to disable one of the Heralds in order to enable Grace. I would probably disable Ash first, since Herald of Ice greatly increases our damage through hypothermia and we don't inherantly look for cold damage to spells elsewhere. If you want to play around with other sources of cold damage then Ash singularly does give greater damage for the reservation. HoI is also quite good for clearing.

Boots:
For the harder content where being slowed through non-elemental means (poison traps, Elder non-freeze 'freeze', stun) Kaom's Roots are going to be put on. For all other regular mapping, a decent pair of rare boots with high evasion, resists, and life and movement speed are ideal. So you'll have a few extra gem sockets to play around with. Decoy totem is very good, blood rage is a welcome addition to clear speed and charge production, and flame dash is useful for gaps. You can also choose to socket in a lightning golem here if you so choose, or on an unset ring. Socket colors here are going to be a bit obnoxious however if you go for pure evasion.

Level 88 Life based version - 487k
Of note in this version, all of the gear rolls have been reduced greatly to provide a reasonable snapshot of life and damage values against Shaper/Guardians damage tankiness. Notice in the configuration that shocked monsters has been replaced with 'taunted' and a custom mod roll for taun being added to the amulet. Actual shock values in this build are higher than 20% damage taken, elemental pendulum effects do trigger on a rotating buff, and cast aspect has a higher damage buff, no flasks are enabled... all of these were omitted from the PoB for realistic expectations.

Level 95 Life based version - 1 mil
Notable differences include equipping a magical weapon, assuming flasks and pendulum, and finishing the life nodes nearby the tree.

We have to reach 20% ignite avoidance on jewels, which can be done with only two with perfect 10% rolls. We also want to find added lightning damage to spells for shocking, and added fire damage to spells for igniting. Since we are fire damage based, the more flat added fire damage to spells the better. Life and other good stats include missing resistances, dexterity, and crit/cast speed/multi.

Ascendancy: Elementalist
Order of Ascendancy selection as recommended:
1. Shaper of Desolation
2. Beacon of Ruin
3. Pendulum of Destruction
4. Mastermind of Discord

If you felt like it, you could flip these two ascendancy choices and go for Mastermind first, in order to reserve less mana for the leveling process. I however found that waiting for Beacon of Ruin for the Uber trial to be a huge problem when I was getting to the end-game, and since there are double curse effects in the build, I felt that the penetration of the Herald damage contribution and reservation was simply less important. During no part of the build did I discuss Pendulum or Conflux, as I really don't feel like they are important mechanically or thematically. I will mention that conflux will likely only ever feel enjoyable at early levels, and that Pendulum range of AoE increase becomes exciting and important by the time characters reach mapping stages. This further influenced my decision on ascendancy priority.

Bandits: Help Alira
Crit multiplier and resists are really good. You could kill all, but only if your gear is really substantially good.

Pantheon
Major: Soul of Solaris
Minor: Soul of Abberath

My reasoning for not taking Brine King, is that stun immunity isn't tremendously important if we cannot be interrupted from casting due to stuns. On HC, I can see Brine King being taken for additional security, but I don't think it's necessary. Abberath is huge for any ES build due to ground effect burning being so annoying, and since we're CI we ignore desecrated ground. So it allows for a more passive playstyle. The weakness of the build in my opinion is big hits from bosses, hence Solaris.

Q: Why Flame Surge? Why not literally any other skill?
A: When I originally designed the build, it was actually intended to be an incinerate guide. Through testing and fine-tuning, Incinerate was deemed inefficient and simply worse than other alternatives. Other skills were also tested using this mechanism for viability, and Flame Surge was really just the best option. Other skills required too heavy of an investment in jewels or gear to make function, and this build is already considerably heavy in uniques.


As you can see, the instant damage at great range of Flame Surge makes the skill perform more like a 'spear' than a cone, as some people have become familiar with in other skills. This does not mean that it is good or bad, simply that a different idea of how to deal damage to groups of enemies is needed. Herald of Ash resolves most of our clearspeed concerns with distributing the large front-end damage to packs of monsters, and the clearspeed has felt sufficient in yellow maps thus far.

Q: Why did you post this as a CI build first?
A: I played the CI one first, and theorized that a life based version would be superior simply because of the decision to emphasize on Inpulsa's at a later date. It felt better to play overall so I made it the primary build of the two.

Q: So is this build HC viable?
A: The life based version could definitely be HC viable, but I haven't taken it to red tier bosses yet. It's obliterating t11's with a brightbeak so far, so I'm fairly optimistic. The CI version could swap to Incandescent heart to make it tankier, and the Life based version intends to go for Farrul's Fur at some point, which would add a grace aura further improving survival. Anything is HC viable if you recognize your weaknesses and play to your strengths. Weakness of the build is that it's max life is 7500-ish with really good gear and evasion based.

Q: Why aren't you running all three Heralds?
A: Herald of Thunder is only really an extra source of shock and ignite. We run Ash which spreads burning onto targets, tempest shield can ignite, orb of storms definitely does, and choir/voice whenever we crit (on a cooldown). Herald of Thunder is just overkill then. This is a fire damage scaling build. And it eventually wants to run Grace also. Herald of Thunder just doesn't work at all for our purposes.

Q: Why waste skill points on Ailment Avoidance instead of just getting it on flasks like everyone else?
A: This build specifically paths near the Crystal Skin as part of it's intended pathing/gearing. We need the dexterity, Acrobatics is really strong for it, and it's a good jewel socket. Arcane Potency and considering Purity of Flesh is what most people would do instead, and it's simply not comprable in my book. You get up to 121 skill points, but only 5 flasks. Approaching ailments from this approach gives us flexibility in our flask suffix choices where we wouldn't otherwise, of Reflexes, of Warding, of Adrenaline, and of Staunching wouldn't all fit with 'of Heat' etc. also. You have to make concessions with flasks if you try to include elemental ailment removal also. Why not just spend the three points, prioritize some on gear, and enjoy the significant quality of life?

Q: What is your obsession with making builds that use stuff that isn't popular?
A: If a build can be made from cheap items that is strong enough to clear the majority of the game content, then I have added value to the game and that is rewarding. I also have a friend who has played just about every build in PoE, so it's always a fun challenge to make new builds for him.

On the surface it may not seem like much, but there is actually a specific interaction occurring to enable the build to function automatically.

First, consider our Ascendancy 'Beacon of Ruin'

Besides providing elemental proliferation for us, it enforces two regimes that mechanically alter how our character performs. First, it removes the requirement of a damage threshold 'floor' in order for a cold or lightning based hit that succeeds in rolling a chill or shock ailment. This means that any hit of cold or lightning that is also going to chill or shock, now does so 100% of the time without considering the life or elemental resistance of the monster.
(Keep in mind that monster 'chance to avoid status ailments' still functions as normal, due to 'by at least' only removing the threshold for ailment.)

Flame Surge cannot ignite targets. It does 50% More damage to targets that are ignited. It can cause other ailments, such as shock, if the character was able to shock with fire damage. Shaper of Desolation gives 6 seconds out of 14 able to ignite despite this limitation.


Herald of Thunder cannot shock targets. It can cause other ailments, such as ignite, if the character was able to ignite with lightning damage.


StormFire Gets us started by allowing our lightning damage to ignite. Herald of Thunder will now be able to ignite targets.


Yoke of Suffering allows any/all of our elemental damage to shock. Flame Surge can now shock targets. Voila. With just this setup, we have ignition and shock functionally automated. The process looks like this:

1/. Flame Surge hits a target with sufficient shock chance on items, gear, and tree.
2/. Monster dies. Herald of Thunder + Ash kick in. Other targets are shocked & ignited by on-kill effect. Dual curses are applied.
3/. Flame Surge hits next target, which is shocked, burning, dual cursed, and chilled. Yoke of Suffering More damage is in effect.
4/. Pack is quickly dead. Move on to next pack. Skip step 1.
--

The build also benefits from three additional unique items to improve our capabilities:


Mind of the Council returns 3% of our maximum mana each time that we shock a target. This is not over 4 seconds, it is instant. Very important and useful for being able to reserve large amounts of mana and still never be out of mana.


Berek's Grip causes targets that are shocked to leech 1% of the damage dealt to them from all of our sources as life. Since we consistently shock, and have no floor for our shock to fail to apply, this is for all extensive purposes 100% up-time. You can safely ignore the effect on frozen targets for our purposes.


Incandescent Heart does three things for our build. It moves 25% of all elemental damage received into chaos, which since we have the Chaos Inoculation Keystone, this means that 25% of all elemental damage taken is completely negated. This occurs after resistances have been factored. It also gives us chaos damage as a portion of all elemental damage we perform (which has an important role for us with Orb of Storms). And finally, it is a source of armour which as an energy shield character, becomes a prized stat to acquire some value of.

I only would use Incandescent heart for hardcore / highly difficult elemental damage encounters, instead prefering Inpulsa's for everyday use.


First and foremost, Shaped gloves with 30% avoid stun while casting is my method for overcoming the risk of stun. We're using all of our jewellery slots up, so that's how it goes.
Having shaped gloves with global Blind chance on them is a huge improvement to survivability. The Orb of Storms is intended to be in the gloves, so that OoS can benefit from having the Blind support gem socketed with it. This would improve bossing and any additional socketed gems that might roll on gloves that could hopefully increase the mana cost of Orb of Storms would also allow us to increase the level of the linked Arcane Surge.

Inpulsa's Broken Heart, Fenumus' Shroud or other chest armours are entirely OK to replace the Incandescent Heart. However, I use the chestpiece I choose for how well it fit into the goals of the build. Inpulsa's would be my go-go pick for general map-clearing if I did not use Incandescent, especially since it protects the wearer from Shock (something that is a downside of Mind of the Council, but easily maintained with flask usage).

My character at level 75:


The second Quicksilver flask should be The Wise Oak. The glove should have the Orb of Storms socketed in it rather than the boots, but colors on my Sin Treks convinced me otherwise for now. Sin Treks should be rare boots with stats/resistances needed. Unset ring will become StormFire when the character reaches level 80. Placeholder belt for Crystal Belt, however it's quite good at helping the build reach strength requirements. The stun avoidance of 30% on gloves is core to the build, passives and that shaped mod roll were key in designing how I would overcome the risk of stuns from content considering that Eye of Chayula is not possible due to Yoke, Valyrium is not possible due to ring slots being taken, and Unwavering Stance being tremendously far away. The build has 100% uninterruptible chance while casting, which means that our leech effects will never be turned off due to becoming stunned.

Ideal Gear:
A Rare Sceptre with cast speed, cold damage to spells, reasonable spell damage %increases. Sambar or Void sceptres are both quite good. High energy-shield boots with added fire damage on kill would be nice. Helm Enchant to increase Flame Surge damage/damage against burning enemies, or even lightning golem buff effect 150%.

Main Skill:

Flame Surge - Spell Echo - Immolate - Controlled Destruction
These four gems are your core, 'main' links and what you will use until you get a 5 or 6 link. Add an area gem for your fifth, and a final 'more' damage gem link or utility gem for your 6th link.


Concentrated Effect or Increased Area of Effect
For general mapping and clearing, Inc. AoE. Swap to Conc. Effect for bossing.


Hypothermia gives the best 'on paper' damage increase. We are chilling with cold damage on our sceptre ideally in order to benefit from Yoke's 5% damage taken from applying chill to our enemies. If your character has no sources of cold damage, you can choose to run Herald of Ice instead of Arctic Armour to satisfy this condition. Alternatively, other gems are useful here. I use Flame Surge to trigger shock, but I could absolutely see the appeal of Elemental Focus instead of Hypothermia. I did not see 10% more damage as being worth the loss to quality of life that being able to trigger ailments with our main skill granted.

Our Herald of Thunder & curse setup, which practically is always active. On bosses this will disable if there are no additional monsters to kill. The second damage curse could be exchanged for Enfeeble etc. if you plan to play on HC or run difficult map mods. This should be in our boots or helm.

The Orb of Storms setup benefits greatly from having shaped gloves with 'supported by blind' on it. Arcane Surge must be carefully leveled so that the mana cost of Orb of Storms always is sufficient to trigger Arcane Surge, so mana multiplier mod rolls on gloves can allow you to raise the level of Arcane Surge beyond 9. Poison is added because it counts as an ailment on the enemy for an additional 5% damage taken from Yoke of Suffering. Increased Duration is simply quality of life for all three effects active in this setup, however it could be dropped if you have a particular desire to run a vaal skill and the build is otherwise out of socket space.


Scorching Ray on a spell totem is nothing fantastically new. Since we are not linking this to an increased duration gem, it will likely never reach 8 stacks of debuff on targets for us, but it will help on bosses to place one down. The third socket is where I plan to fit my Lightning Golem, so make sure that this is un-linked or else you will be somewhat unhappy with the result.


Auras go in the helm, since it is marginally easier to roll blue and green sockets in our Mind of the Council. The fourth socket is for Enlighten, should you manage to acquire a leveled version. This could also alternatively be a location for flame surge or another movement skill of your choice to traverse edges.

Level 91 CI main version

Life-Based & MoM

Path of Exile website Builder version containing all trees.

Level 40 Tree
The leveling process invests into life to help early on, which will eventually be dropped when we switch to Chaos Inoculation / Energy Shield. Much of the early levels is simply traveling to the locations of our major nodes.

Level 60 Tree
By this point, almost all of the major pathing is complete. Greater investment into fire damage and overall survivability was achieved. 13 total skill points will be refunded when we switch over to CI. These will be spent reaching Foresight, enabling CI & Ghost Reaver, and a few other ES nodes around the tree. Example

Level 91 Tree
At this point, all of the major nodes and damage has been acquired. There is still a lot of good nodes to reach out for that will benefit the build, but level 90~91 seems like a good place to call the build 'done'.

Leveling:
Flame Surge is really lackluster for leveling, as you will want a skill that has greater range and does not require level 80 uniques to enable it's full damage. Firestorm, Incinerate, even Fireball are entirely viable for leveling with. I used Incinerate myself, or frostbolt if I have 2x Frozen Trail jewels. Also notice the heavy investment into %Life on tree at level 40, so make sure you're finding gear with flat life during the leveling process.

I have been experimenting with using a Healthy Mind jewel by the Melding wheel, as the additional mana feels really good for our mana recovery 3%. Jewel roll priorities should first fix resistances, dexterity and strength requirements. Then focus on the following in order of priority:

Flat ES / % ES
Added Cold Damage to spells / while holding a shield if you do not have a sceptre that does this for you.
Added Fire Damage to spells / while holding a shield
Cast Speed / if you've crit recently
Increased Damage
Intelligence

Ascendancy: Elementalist
Order of Ascendancy selection as recommended:
1. Shaper of Desolation
2. Beacon of Ruin
3. Pendulum of Destruction
4. Mastermind of Discord

If you felt like it, you could flip these two ascendancy choices and go for Mastermind first, in order to reserve less mana for the leveling process. I however found that waiting for Beacon of Ruin for the Uber trial to be a huge problem when I was getting to the end-game, and since there are double curse effects in the build, I felt that the penetration of the Herald damage contribution and reservation was simply less important. During no part of the build did I discuss Pendulum or Conflux, as I really don't feel like they are important mechanically or thematically. I will mention that conflux will likely only ever feel enjoyable at early levels, and that Pendulum range of AoE increase becomes exciting and important by the time characters reach mapping stages. This further influenced my decision on ascendancy priority.

Bandits: Kill All
None of the bandit rewards outweigh two skill points. Kraitlyn's cast speed and movespeed could possibly be nice, but in my opinion simply not worth 2 points.

Pantheon
Major: Soul of Solaris
Minor: Soul of Abberath

My reasoning for not taking Brine King, is that stun immunity isn't tremendously important if we cannot be interrupted from casting due to stuns. On HC, I can see Brine King being taken for additional security, but I don't think it's necessary. Abberath is huge for any ES build due to ground effect burning being so annoying, and since we're CI we ignore desecrated ground. So it allows for a more passive playstyle. The weakness of the build in my opinion is big hits from bosses, hence Solaris.

Q: Why Flame Surge? Why not literally any other skill?
A: When I originally designed the build, it was actually intended to be an incinerate guide. Through testing and fine-tuning, Incinerate was deemed inefficient and simply worse than other alternatives. Other skills were also tested using this mechanism for viability, and Flame Surge was really just the best option. Other skills required too heavy of an investment in jewels or gear to make function, and this build is already considerably heavy in uniques.


As you can see, the instant damage at great range of Flame Surge makes the skill perform more like a 'spear' than a cone, as some people have become familiar with in other skills. This does not mean that it is good or bad, simply that a different idea of how to deal damage to groups of enemies is needed. Herald of Ash resolves most of our clearspeed concerns with distributing the large front-end damage to packs of monsters, and the clearspeed has felt sufficient in yellow maps thus far.

Q: Why post this build guide at level 75?
A: My real life time has been heavily impacted, and I started on Hardcore this league. I have every intention of reaching red maps, guardians, and atziri for clear videos. The build was simply at a point where I believed it was viable and solid enough to share, to give players the most amount of time this league to try it for themselves.

Q: So is this build HC viable?
A: I think it could be, if the player was well experienced at playing ES characters. In the current life-based meta, less so. I think this build should be played by someone in SC before attempted in HC, simply because of the challenges in switching from life to ES.

Q: Ignite is the ailment, burn isn't. Your guide is wrong.
A: You are correct that Ignite is the ailment, burn is the debuff of damage that happens due to the ignite. Herald of Ash does not ignite targets, and therefore no where in the guide did I state that ele prolif is being propagated by HoA. Herald of Thunder on the other hand is totally causing the ignites, and those are proliferated.

Q: What is your obsession with making builds that use stuff that isn't popular?
A: If a build can be made from cheap items that is strong enough to clear the majority of the game content, then I have added value to the game and that is rewarding. I also have a friend who has played just about every build in PoE, so it's always a fun challenge to make new builds for him.