MF Witch: Righteous Fire + Pain Attunement

Introduction

This is a build that makes use of the ‘Pain Attunement’ keystone and the ‘Righteous Fire’ skill gem. Through a high amount of ES and the ‘Zealot’s Oath’ keystone you will be able to mitigate the high self-burn damage from RF.

Pros:
- Massive, massive, massive, massive damage
- No particular need for a 5Link, extremely cheap to itemize relative to damage output
- Extremely high IIQ and IIR
- Very flexible

Cons:
- Although not a particularly expensive character, the itemization may prove to be difficult due to specific item requirements
- As an addendum to the above point, you may have mana problems without proper gear
- Reflect mobs slow you down (but are not impossible)
- Susceptible to chaos damage

Skill & Support Gems

You will be using Righteous Fire in a +2 fire gems wand on your weapon swap.

Helm: 4Linked
Boots: 4Linked
Gloves: 4Linked
Chest armor: 4+Linked
Main hand: 3L

4Link (6Link): Ice Spear // GMP + Chain + Faster casting (+ IIR + IIQ)
We use Ice Spear for the defensive properties (freezing) and high range. GMP can be replaced with LMP. If you have a 5+Link and run into mana problems you can add Reduced mana. Another thing you can do is replace Chain with Increased critical damage, although I have tested both variations and found Chain to be superior. The Mana leech gem is an option as well.

4Link: Ice Spear // Spell totem + GMP + Faster casting
Spell totem provides additional damage and freeze support where necessary as well as letting us deal with reflect mobs. It also enables you to turn corners in maps such as Sewers.

4Link: Clarity, Discipline, Purity // Reduced mana
Our auras. If Purity consumes too much mana you can swap it out for Grace. Keep in mind that this will increase the self-burn effect from RF as you will lose maximum resistances.

4Link: Bear Trap, Bear Trap // Culling strike + Added fire damage
Our single target damage. If you are worried about Bear trap getting the kill (i.e. if you are running IIR and/or IIQ support gems) you can replace Culling strike with Added cold damage or Increased critical strikes/damage.

3Link: Vitality // Reduced mana, Blood magic
You will want to leave Blood magic at level 13, the cost multiplier will be 213%. This makes Vitality reserve 85.2% of your maximum life. Reduced mana should be level 14. This makes it reserve 65.604% of your maximum life, leaving you with 34.396% left. You need to be at 35% life or less for ‘low life’-effects to trigger (such as Pain Attunement). Keep in mind that going lower will significantly reduce your light radius and that some maps will not be playable due to this and thus it is recommend to keep it as close to 35% as possible. I can say that keeping it at this amount is no significant impairment to your vision. Keep in mind that quality on ‘Reduced mana’ is useless for auras.

3Sock: Frostbite (or Elemental weakness), Enfeeble, [choice] (mine is Grace)
These are our curses. Frostbite is your main curse, Enfeeble is for specific situations and your third gem can be anything you want. Temporal chains and Grace are probably the best options. Lightning warp, Molten shell, Frost wall, Vulnerability (increases Bear trap damage) and Conversion trap are valid alternatives.

This gives us 7 hotkeys:
1. Ice Spear
2. Ice Spear totem
3. Bear trap
4. Bear trap
5. Frostbite
6. Enfeeble
7. [Choice]

Obviously you can set them up however you want to, but I recommend doing it like so:

Left click – move only
Middle click – [choice]
Right click – Ice Spear
Q – Bear Trap
W – Bear Trap
E – Frostbite
R – Ice Spear totem
T – Enfeeble

Skill Tree

Standard tree
37 points
60 points
90 points, lvl 70
105 points, lvl 85
120 points, theoretical lvl 100

Ideally you want to get away with not putting too many points into energy shield passives, but this is entirely gear dependent.

Crit variation – Skill Tree

105 points, lvl 85

This build is much more expensive; it requires you to have an extremely high amount of ES on gear, Astramentis and a 6L. Most chaos damage is projectile based and with arrow dodging you will be able to avoid the majority of it. Your 6L will have Life leech and Mana leech as your 5th and 6th gems and you will sustain your energy shield through Vitality, Ghost reaver and more ES nodes.

Never enough damage, shock stacking – Skill Tree

107 points, lvl 87

For maximum damage output. With this build, you will use a 20% quality Added Lightning Damage on your Ice Spear and the curses Elemental Weakness + Conductivity (preferably quality).

In mana we trust

106 points, lvl 86

If you’re really worried about mana you can do this, but you sacrifice a lot of damage.

Itemization

ES and resists
You will need 80% fire resist base and purity. Purity will give you 4% (5% at max level thanks to Inner Force), which makes for 16% fire damage. Inner Force amplifies RF, and thus 16 + [(16 / 10) * 3]= 20.8% of your maximum life in damage. You want to take your life and take 20.8% of that which will give you [x], this is how much damage you’re going to take. Now you want to take 1.5% life regen from golem’s blood, the amount of life regen you get from Vitality (+30% from Inner Force). This will give you [Y]. Now you will need to outregen [x] per second, which means you will need to regen >[x] per second. The way you can do this is by dividing 100 by [y] which gives you [n], and then you do [n] * [x]. Example:

I have 1000 life and thus take 208 damage per second.
I have a lvl 14 Vitality which gives me 1.2% regen. 130% (Inner Force) of 1.2 is 1.56%. I have golem’s blood which is 1.5%. This gives me 3.06% of life regenerated per second, lets say that we have 3.00% for the purpose of this calculation. You do 100 / 3 which gives you 33.3 and then you do 33.3 * 208 = ~6927 ES needed. You won’t be having 1000 life though; most likely it will be more around 600-700 which means that the ES you’re going to need will be around 4000-4500 with a lvl 14 Vitality. The higher your Vitality, the less ES you need (lvl 14 Vitality is only lvl req. 56).

Attributes
You’re going to have 114 dex, 114 strength and 300 intelligence from this build, meaning you need +40ish to strength and dexterity (and if you want to refund the Agility nodes you’ll need even more). These are items that can help you accomplish the attribute-from-gear requirement:

1. Use the Perandus Blazon unique belt. This gives you +(20-30) to all attributes as well as +(8-12)% IIQ. An excellent item.
2. Use a rare Onyx amulet
3. Wondertrap gives +(5-10) to dexterity and strength
4. +all attributes is a suffix that can spawn on jewelry
5. Random +stat mods on gear pieces

Main hand and off hand

1. Double Redbeak, 200% extra damage for Bear trap as well and very cheap
2. Springleaf (6% regen on low life)
3. Saffell’s Frame (+5% max resist, +10 all resist, +(20-30)% spell damage, high block against spells (melee typically won’t hurt you anyway)
4. Wand(s) with mods such as: spell damage, mana/mana regen, critical strike, critical strike mulitiplier, cast speed.
5. A shield with high ES and other stats. This one is pretty nice, as it has regen, ES, armor and resists:


Specific items which may be useful

Belt: Perandus Blazon has everything we need
Boots: Wondertrap, 100% rarity and stats
Gloves: I crafted the gloves myself; you will want to get itemlvl 77 gloves and use alterations until you manage to get the Dragon’s prefix (+19-24 rarity) and the Amassment suffix (+17-20 quantity). Then you want to regal it and hit a second IIR suffix, the highest goes from 21-26%. You can get 50% rarity and 20% quantity like this in trade for 1 prefix and 2 suffixes, then you can exalt it 3 times. Another option is Aurseize, but I really dislike the movement speed reduction and prefer an ES-glove base.
Helm: Rime Gaze is amazing; it gives us mana, ES and cold damage. Additionally, you can play around with Fire trap instead of Bear trap due to concentrated effect, effectively making the helm a 5L.
Rings: Double Andvarius is the obvious option, but you will need maximum fire and cold resist (cold resist for reflect). Dream Fragments is an excellent option due to the mana and cannot be frozen affixes, as well as base cold resist. Doedre’s Damning is nice as well; it allows you to use Critical weakness together with Frostbite, although I’m unsure why you would feel the need to get more damage.
Chest: a 6Linked chest with massive ES is the best. Ideally you want close to 30% chaos res, the highest possible +ES roll, the highest possible %ES roll and the Djinn prefix (+42-50% ES). This is all really specific and expensive, so anything coming close to it is awesome. Other non-ES prefixes, such as life, may help with surviving chaos damage sprinkled in here and there (i.e. multiple projectile vaal constructs/snakes). Here is an excellent example:
sadly I’m currently trying to 6Link this; already got 5Link 3 times…

i liked the idea.

push

Sounds interesting, will have to check it out more closely. On a side note, I don't think you can have more than one bear trap anymore because they share the cool down now.

use the covenant instead of blood magic gem
so you can run 3 aura on life, then switch back to your armor

"

TheGilliom wrote:

Sounds interesting, will have to check it out more closely. On a side note, I don't think you can have more than one bear trap anymore because they share the cool down now.

Incorrect, multiple bear traps still work

Trying this build atm, im at lvl 31.

Objective is farm docks/city of sarn on HC with full MF and MAYBE try some low level maps if i get shav.

Will report the results. Gonna get +3 skill points in bandits, but i guess +8% all resist (double andvarius) and 4% cast speed would be more beneficial.

Invested in this spec over the last two days and I will say at level 40 this build does massive dmg but survivability is very limited due to the low ES until higher levels. Skills wise i have never been more impressed with a spell totem combination and I cannot believe i never used bear trap in the past. it rocks. as of right now stats are very sporadic but pretty much with or without stats if you have correct gemming you do plenty of dps. even without auras. the spell totem and bear trap completely cripples opponents. after that its like shooting fish in a barrel