Niffler´s Endgame Righteous Fire Guide [2.0.0]

The main core of the passive tree for RF is still pretty similar to what it was. The main differences affecting RF I believe are the added Jewel sockets, the change in the placement of the Holy Fire node & imo most importantly the reworked Blood Magic area of the skilltree.


I'm not entirely sure if it will still be worth going for Holy Fire (probably?) and how many jewel passives we'll want, but I'd like to discuss the Blood Magic area. Picking up Blood Magic will allow us access to some insanely good passives which are gated behind it: there are 2x 10% max life nodes and a new reworked Mortal Conviction, which now gives 15% max life AND 50% reduced mana (hp, because Blood Magic also affects auras) reservation.

Having your auras reserved from your hp instead of mana does sound pretty bad at first and tbh, I'm fairly certain you definitely wont want to run Determination anymore at least before you get Kaom's or something to make up for the big hp loss. However, Vitality and PoF should imo be alright even if reserved from life. I used https://poe.mikelat.com/beta/ to calculate how it'd work however, here comes some very rough and rounded math.

Assume 7k hp before picking up the 35% max life available behind Blood Magic. 35% extra would pump it up to 9450. Now, taking into account the 15% mana cost reduction we would always get from the Unrelenting area and swapping our current Reduced mana gem to the new reworked Enlighten (lvl 3), the hp reserved for PoF and Vitality wouldn't be as bad anymore. Keep in mind, their reservation costs have also been reduced in 2.0. So in the end, it would look like something like this.

So basically, our unreserved hp would be at about 6.8k instead of 7k, but we would in addition to that also gain the increased base damage for RF and life regen from the 35% increased maximum life, which would be insanely good and would really mean, that even with 200 hp less, we'd have quite a bit of more survivability thanks to the extra %regen we'll get due to a bigger lifepool. It also frees up our Blood Magic skillgem slots, more about that later.

I tried out some different options for builds, and assuming we'll either get 3 or 6 more passives (couldn't find confirmation to this) thanks to act 4 on all difficulties, a lvl 85 RF marauder/scion/templar with 2 bandit passives wouldn't have to sacrifice too much to grab these points at the Blood Magic area - it would in total be a 6 passive point commitment to travel there from the Bloodless nodes and grab all the required nodes. Comparing this for example to the area left of Scion (the 5% hp nodes connected to Constitution), you'd get 35% max hp, 20 str AND the bonuses for BM & Mortal Conviction for 6 points, whereas getting just 35% max hp at the 5% nodes connected to Constitution would take us 7 points. Obviously you still want to most likely get these nodes aswell, at some point at least, but just using it as a comparison on efficacy.

Now picking up the Blood Magic keystone also allows us to get rid of all our Blood Magic skillgems (and gives us freedom to use more abilities without worrying about linking them to BM to be able to use them, giving the build a tad more active playstyle) and pick something else instead, which moves us to the next area of discussion...

So, some of the upcoming changes to skillgems and picking up the BM keystone will free us a total of 6 skillgem slots (assuming you're using the ones in the op by Niffler), illustrated in the pic below:



The most obvious and important part here is the fact that now a 5link chest will be enough for dualcursing - the Blood Magic slot can be swapped to Flammability. It will however be a major pita to chrome a 5L Belly to have 3 blues, 1 green and 1 red :P It'd on average (according to http://siveran.github.io/calc.html) cost 142 chromatics using the Vorici "at least 1 blue" master crafting option.

Now for the rest. As explained before, you'd most likely want to replace your current Reduced Mana with an Enlighten. It will no longer be used to be able to sustain more auras like atm when the auras are taken from your mana, instead, it'll be picked up to give you a substantial boost in unreserved life.

This still leaves the slot you currently use for Determination free, as it would at least in my opinion dip your unreserved life too low to sustain it in addition to PoF and Vitality. I decided to move Immortal Call here since it doesn't apparently (read this on Reddit, not 100% sure on the details) benefit from the Increased Duration skillgem anymore. It doesn't really benefit from the other gems in here so it could be changed somewhere else where there is a free slot, however I felt there were better options for the other freed up slots.

There is a really cool new support gem called Fortify. It grants 25% damage reduction from all sources (except degenerations) for 4 seconds after using the melee skill linked to it. Due to this, I changed my movement setup from the Lightning Warp setup (which would require 3 links in 2.0) to a Leap Slam setup (which only requires LS & Faster Attacks). This slows our movement down a little (unless you're using a Brightbeak isntead of Doryani's) but grants us a safe and easy initiation to large packs due to the 25% dmg reduction you'll get. It will also be an easy 25% reduction on demand, making the playstyle both more proactive and reactive. The change from lightning dmg to physical also benefits me personally a lot, since I'm mostly playing with my Arc witch friend, with whom Lightning Warp tends to sometimes proc EE if I accidentaly hit enemies with it. This also frees up the 4th slot, for which I picked Vaal Cyclone for more clearspeed. It doesn't require any links, but it does benefit from both Faster Attacks and Fortify, which I'm totally fine with!

New cries have also been added in addition to Enduring Cry. The options are Abyssal Cry & Rallying Cry. Out of these two, Rallying Cry sounded like it could really work well with RF and also, once again, make the playstyle more proactive and reactive. Basically, it gives groupwide increased damage based on surrounding enemies (10% base, 140% more per 100 enemies at level 1) and some mana regen, which might benefit our party members. I thought it natural to add Rallying Cry to the 3link with Enduring Cry & Spell Echo, since also Rally will double its efficiency due to the Echo. Both cries share the 4 second cooldown, but last longer than that, so you can alternate between them or just use them based on the situation at hand - Enduring Cry for charges/survival & Rallying for dps.

Now, for the last part. Since we earlier moved Immortal Call away from our second 3link, we now have a completely free 3link setup for use. This can be used for something situational, but after reading about the new Flame Golem, I thought it'd complement a traditional RF build very well. Fire Golem is a ranged minion which increases the owners damage by 15% constantly and at least according to GGG's Awakening website, prefers to stay at ranged instead of following the owner to melee. According to some reddit comments, the damage increase doesn't go higher with gem levels, but the life of the golem will. I'm not too sure about the viability of the golem's damage, but as its a minion, it won't proc EE and and since it also deals fire damage like we do, it will benefit from all the -resist to fire which we apply.

Now, what makes this Golem great is the things we can link it to. Blind seems to have great synergy with the Golem, further increasing our own survival. Another passive that works really well with the Golem is Culling Strike. If you feel like you don't need the survival from Blind, you could even swap an IIR skillgem and link it with the golem & Culling and have your own mini-culler. The only thing I'm worried about with the golem is its own survival, but once again according to some posts, it is alright with a character with fairly good clearspeed.

So, the final skillgem setup would look something like this: