I need help with Flame Totem MF

I played a dual flame totem Templar build and grabbed whatever was around, it can kill piety in less than 1 minute if she goes straight into fire mode first, but dominus kills me without vitality. I do not have a large enough mana pool, nor high enough regen. This is why I am wanting to optimize my pathing and I believe Scion is a better choice to start with.



I want to have a build that will farm Piety/Dom and some early maps with IR+Culling. It is not intended to be the best endgame build, for that I'll play something else.

I would like to go farm mode as soon as I can get passed the titty bitches before Piety.


Tree grabbing everything I thought would be essential


I feel that I will not have the ability to sustain all the auras, along with the MOM passive and the 245mana per cast of flame totem.

I feel I should condense the build, but I feel I need the MOM passive since its next to IR/Totem nodes/life. If I did not dip to the bottom, I could get more mana/life/damage.

4 Link

+2 Cold wand


Shield


Chest


4link


4Link



Please tell me where I'm going wrong because I feel this is the best build for me in order to MF solo or with parties since you can find everything on your own and forgo special uniques early on.

If I just farm piety/dom for currency, I am already negative quantity after a few levels, so is this even worth it in the long run? So at 80 will Dominus even be worth it?

Just go BM Flame Totem. Great Survivability and mana cost/life regen is not a problem. You don't need any auras for it, works wonders without. Used to run it in Ambush, farming Dominus was easy as pie.
Basic tree from memory:


Good luck:)

I have been weary of the blood magic build because I like having auras/buffs BUT I will look into it because it is much easier to pick life nodes and manage life regen over mana.

"

gathor wrote:

Just go BM Flame Totem. Great Survivability and mana cost/life regen is not a problem.

+1 to this. expjah made an excellent guide on an BM dual totem MF build in the marauder section and i think it can be modified for scions as well seeing as all you really need to do is switch the regen nodes in the starting point.

as an additional bonus, gearing is less restrictive as you can just focus on life and resists instead of worrying about mana regen and mana mods on items. this also frees up sockets since instead of auras, you can put in a 4-link cull totem

as long as your regen is more than half of the flame totem cost, you're in the clear. personally, i'd go for at least 200hp/s which will give you enough buffer to spam totems in the case that they die too fast.

for skills, make sure you have flammability or elemental weakness (depending on socket color) as it will increase dps significantly. i also use temp chains on the frenzy aura miscreation miniboss and the cyclone boss as i feel that they have a habit of moving too quickly away from my totem's shotgun range. :edit: didn't see that you have a flammability gem so disregard that one.

for dominus, the best way to avoid deaths in the first phase is to drop totems either to the left or right of where he lands and use the machine in the middle to break line of sight of his lightning stream. for the second phase, the faster projectile gem and proper placement of the totems will address two of the add spawn rings that appear during his bunny form while the spread of the flames will kill off the melee adds when they come close to your totem. the only add that could be a problem is the tentacled miscreations. after a while, you will get the feel of the fight and dominus becomes a breeze. i've been farming dominus since i was level 75 and i can usually down him in just over 2 minutes including the miniboss phase with only 1.5k tooltip dps on my dps totem.

i've attached the skill tree i'm using right now as well as my gear to show the links i'm using. hope this could help you out.





dont mind some of the weird gems there like the multistrike, melee phys and IB. just levelling them.

as for currency, i currently get around 10 alt orbs worth of rares every run along with a unique every 2-3 runs.

What I am hearing and reading is that we do not need mana for flame totem to be good at being cheap and providing IIR/Cull properties?

If I will only use Blood Magic Keystone, then I believe we would want Armor/Energy shield combo?

I'm looking for a fun easy farming/culling toon to stack rarity and not care of resist as I did with my current flame totem build. My toon is missing easy passage on its way to Dominus and surviving the bleeds from the 2nd phase.

I'll take a better look at the blood magic aspect and look at the skill tree. Anything that is easy to level and farm currency to support my specialty toons will succeed in pleasing me :)

"

LovelyNella wrote:

What I am hearing and reading is that we do not need mana for flame totem to be good at being cheap and providing IIR/Cull properties?

If I will only use Blood Magic Keystone, then I believe we would want Armor/Energy shield combo?

that is correct. from what i understood from expjah's guide, the idea of going blood magic was mainly to bypass the steep mana cost of casting 6L flame totems (which could hit 350+ per cast) which in turn severely restricts our item choices in stacking IRR gear. by having a decent life pool and enough regen, BM totem build negate the life cost of totems within 2-3 seconds. i have to stress that based on my experience, quality is extremely important for BM flame totem builds as we want to minimize the instances where we spam totems like there is no tomorrow to the point that our regen cannot handle the life drain.

I would prefer using a full armor rather than a hybrid since we aren't taking any increased es nodes nor es regen, armor would outweigh ES in damage mitigation. though personally, i found that the gameplay of totem builds allows us to strategically place totems in ways that would keep us away from most incoming damage. I used to run my build wearing a tabula rasa with only 1k armor and 1k evade total and i was doing fine thanks to the CWDT setup but i had to go to a 5-link to address the resistance penalty of my andvarius. (6L armor be expensive yo)

:edit:

added is the link to expjah's BM MF flame totem build. if you watch the dominus kill video, it gives an example of what i meant in my previous reply regarding totem positioning during domi-kun's bunny form

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/876291

Thank you very much for the feedback.

It looks like i'll be looking into bloodmagic and have a DPS totem along with a Culling totem from now on.

I'll get to work checking out the trees and seeing what I like. One of them being I love endurance charges + life regen per charge.