[2.4.0] Tanky RF Elementalist mjolner witch, volls not required

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So I've been playing around with this build in Hardcore Essence for a few days as I've always wanted to screw around with CoC and a Mjolner but I'm a bit confused on one bit: why do you need to use a divine orb on the Mjolner? You never quite explained that as far as I could tell. What threshold on the mod(s) are you trying to get? Here's mine as it is right now:

Thanks! More questions soon to come as this is my first RF and first melee of any type in a long time.

Divine Orbs are meant for players with Legacy version of mjolner to change it to the current nerfed state.

Regarding the 5th Power Charge, why? Do the molten strike orbs count for Romira's?

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Molten strike hit = P(ower charge)
Discharge(1) = P
MS Hit = PP
Arc = PPP
MS Hit = PPPP
Discharge(4) = P

Are you somehow getting the 5th charge from moltenstrike orbs? Don't they proc Mjolner?


Also, does EE work with the new 2.4 changes now that all 3 lit spells aren't triggering at the same tiem?

Oh, ok! I didn't get that part, so I guess that means I'm totally fine then. Horrah! Thanks so much. I farmed all day yesterday and today to buy the div cards and happened to craft a pretty crazy voll's:

Now I'm not quite sure what to do with it, just continue and die and play on standard with it I guess! Hah.

I will say that the problem I'm having now at level 61 is mobility. The molten strike doesn't go very far and I'm not a fast character yet, at all. Leap slam and shield charge are also quite slow, so I'm thinking that if I can get my attack speed up somehow that leap slam will be much better at clearing, but I'd need some serious move speed some something to really get the best out of shield charge.

Ok, question: How are you calculating your hits per second to make sure you get at least 20? Best I can figure is you're looking at your Attacks per Second and multiplying that by the number of projectiles Molen Strike fires? Is that right? If so, here's mine:

Attacks per Second: 1.38 x 7 Projectiles = 9.66 so I'm still quite low. How exactly did you hit close to 30 per second with your build?

Thanks!

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enemymigs wrote:

Regarding the 5th Power Charge, why? Do the molten strike orbs count for Romira's?

"

Molten strike hit = P(ower charge)
Discharge(1) = P
MS Hit = PP
Arc = PPP
MS Hit = PPPP
Discharge(4) = P

Are you somehow getting the 5th charge from moltenstrike orbs? Don't they proc Mjolner?


Also, does EE work with the new 2.4 changes now that all 3 lit spells aren't triggering at the same tiem?

Mjolner can trigger at maximum 10 times per second for every spell. HIt faster than this and mjolner simply will not trigger. With multistrike and gmp on molten strike, you can easily hit 3 times that often. Each time you hit romiras grants a charge, meaning that as long as you keep hitting things discharge simply cant use charges as fast as you can generate them.

EE may be all right for single target, but generally both arc and discharge have a greater range than molten strike, meaning that it would slow down your clearing of larger groups. Also, shield charge wont proc EE without damage from jewelry. And if you have volls than EE will just decrease discharge damage

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Ok, question: How are you calculating your hits per second to make sure you get at least 20? Best I can figure is you're looking at your Attacks per Second and multiplying that by the number of projectiles Molen Strike fires? Is that right? If so, here's mine:

Attacks per Second: 1.38 x 7 Projectiles = 9.66 so I'm still quite low. How exactly did you hit close to 30 per second with your build?

Thanks!

molten strike hits 8 times per attack (melee strike +7 projectiles). I attack 3.8 times a second, meaning that molten strike hits about 30 times per sec. (8*3.8=30.4) These do fire at a slight delay and in a random spread in a small circle, so against squishy or small opponents it tends to hit less. But any of the big scary boss type monsters are large enough most balls will hit it. IF you watch the charges, against normal mobs you sometimes only generate 2-4 charges (usually cause you cant hit what you already killed) but against anything with health you reliably get 4-5 charges for every discharge.

Ohh! I get it, I was calculating it wrong. I should look at the tooltip then. 7 strikes x .33 attacks / second = 23.1 attacks / second here then, I guess? Thanks for your clarification! I changed the skill tree quite a bit to alter for HC. Sitting at 7.3k HP now with 4 jewel slots that are far from optimal. Was worried that this would be too much of a glass cannon build for HC but I've been able to make it work! Thanks a lot for all your work putting the guide together.

recommended skill for lvling? im about to start this as my 3rd char on essence league, but it seems quite slow experience until you can run the whole setup

I recommend checking out some pure RF guides and basically follow their input on leveling. I did firestorm and firestorm totems. It got pretty hard after level 50 or so but I pushed through and it was totally worth it!

You could try The repentance gloves in the non volls version but you might be starved for defences?

Hey people, so my level 90 RF Mjolner Elementalist died yesterday (it was a really stupid death, had plenty of time to gtfo but I just reacted slowly and apathetically) and I went ahead and uninstalled the game as I was looking for an out and had been wanting to quit anyway. I was planning on making a video guide referencing/crediting this build for the idea but add in what I've learned and changes I'd recommend for HC, but instead I'm just going to post a few things here. I ended up with about 7850 HP, ~50% Armour (70-80% /w flasks), and able to solo some T12-13 maps on EHC with this build, so hopefully my comments are helpful to someone! OP, feel free to add any of this to the original post if you'd like. Thanks again for taking the time to share your awesome guide!

Skills:
Grabbing the two Intelligence nodes to get you started on the far left side of the Witch tree will save you two points that you can use elsewhere.

I found the Arsonist node to be great for us. Fire damage helps the Endurance charges, which contributes to exactly half our Discharge damage (more on that later) and our Righteous Fire while also helping with Life Regen, and since we're already in that area I think it's a very good choice. I recommend it over the .5% you get from the Armour Mastery skill node. Avoiding that area saves you 2 skill points and other than the .5% regen that you lose, I only lost an effective ~2% armour which ended up not being a problem at all.

Unwavering Stance is an excellent choice as getting stunned is a pretty big killer in HC and since we have a sweet Cast When Damage Taken setup (along with a vengeance), getting hit more can actually mean being tankier and more damage for us.

In getting Master of the Arena and Golem's Blood, I recommend going southeast from the Juggernaut area so that you can also pick up Bloodless and have access to another pair of 30 Dex/Int skill nodes. This became very important for me because as I was getting no Dex from my gear, my Dex value of 61 was 1 point too low to run a level 1 Greater Multiple Projectile with my Molten Strike. Bummer! But taking that 30 meant I would get higher levels in not only GMP but also Faster Attacks, Purity of Ice (which I played with a little), and opened up a few more gear options.

Art of the Gladiator is great for more Dex as well as giving us Movement Speed. Because we're using a Shield and Heavy armour, I had a 6% Movement Speed penalty that was removed by this skill. This build is a bit starved for speed to begin with so this was very noticeable for me.

Pendulum of Destruction is neat, but since it increases your RF damage, it also increases your degen effect. Testing gear and calculating this effect became very tedious, and for something bad to happen (like a boss bleed on a map with vulnerability) right at the moment where the skill kicks in, can cause some trouble. I recommend considering taking the two 10% Elemental Damage nodes instead of this notable.

Gear:
I ended up needing two pieces of 4-link gear that could have 3+ blue sockets, so I had to settle on some Armour/Energy Shield combination pieces. If you look hard enough, you can find something pretty decent for us that otherwise doesn't look like anything special:

I tested it and really tried to love it, but I am just not convinced the Kingsguard is worth it, even with the Voll's Devotion, or with running Warlord's Mark. This build already has 4 uniques, and the player killers are usually one shots anyway so give yourself things that help with that on this valuable armour piece: more armour and more strength and life. You can also make your other gear easier to manage with a solid high resistance piece like this one:

Opal Rings are amazing for this build. You can buy a cheap one for 10-15c (at least on EHC) and then roll it with an Anger essence (Screaming is enough for a temporary one) to get a good ring that gives lots of Elemental and Fire Damage helping all 3 of our damage outputs (Discharge Lightning, Discharge Fire, and RF Fire). Getting one with Int, Str, Life, and Fire Damage is tough, but definitely worth it. This is what I ended up with for my 2nd ring and couldn't have been happier with it:

The unique belt suggested in the build is okay, but the Life, Armour and Flask duration effects that you can get on a belt are just too dang awesome to pass up. This belt gave me ~400 extra HP:

Gems:
For Discharge, I found this to be most effective: Iron Will, Elemental Focus, Discharge. I tried Fire/Lightning Penetration as well as leech and found the penetration to not be nearly as helpful damage wise and the leech to be sufficient with a single Life Leech on Hit in the Molten Strike.

For Righteous Fire, I found this to be most effective: Righteous Fire, Increased Burning Damage, Elemental Focus, and Increased AOE/Concentrated Effect. Once you get to about 7k HP, Increased AOE is enough to kill most white/blue mobs in 1-2 seconds alone, but with Concentrated Effect, the damage gets really silly. Switch out for bosses and facetank. Most T9-11's that I was soloing right around when I died would go down in 3-5 seconds.

Lab Mods
I played with the Helmet mods Increased Discharge Damage, Discharge Radius, Righteous Fire Damage, and Righteous Fire Radius and found Increased Discharge Damage to be by far the most helpful. That's where our real damage is. With all the Elemental and Spell Damage scaling that we already have, the extra 40% ended up being huge.

The boot enchant 1-2% Life and Mana Regen is amazing, but I didn't find it worth sacrificing great stats. My experience was that 80-90% of the good enchants were on Energy Shield gear anyway, so all of that was out, and if it did have the mod that I wanted, the rolls were just terrible. I found some good Armour/Strength/Life boots to be overall much more helpful. Again, if you use Body Armour with really good resists, you can get away with focusing on high tier Armour, Strength, Movement Speed, and Life rolls on your boots without breaking the bank. Another thing to consider are the Death's Door. With them, it would be easier to get 6/6 charges (more on that later), and it would save 1-2 flask mods as you no longer need to worry about bleed which is also very helpful. The only downside, and it's a big one, is that they don't have any life.

Other thoughts:
Attack speed, even if you're above the 10 hits per second, is definitely worth it (assuming all your defensive stats are in order already). The sooner you get a hit off, the sooner your molten things are flying, the sooner shit is dead and you can move off to the next, and the sooner you can use another Shield Charge, the faster your clear speed. Speaking of Shield Charge, I recommend Shield Charge, Faster Attacks, and Fortify. With this setup, you can start every pack with a charge (best method clear speed wise too), and then start to facetank spam Molten Strike. The fortify buff will last for about 5 seconds, so if you're facetanking a boss, just make sure to hit Shield Charge before that timer runs out. I made it a habit to charge away from the boss as my Fortify was running out, evaluate the situation, resummon my golems if need be, and then charge back in. Since I was playing HC anyway, it's a good practice to get out of the habit of just facetanking all the things until they die.

Try and get an Alchemist's prefix on a Ruby Flask, like this: Better yet, two. I actually used this flask as a Quicksilver replacement for awhile. The Increased Effect gives an additional +1 Maximum Fire Resist. How freaking cool is that?!

You need to have the same number of Endurance Charges as you do Power Charges for them to actually be generated. I don't remember this being mentioned in the original guide, but this was a huge mistake that I made. I took a bunch of charges on the tree and ended up having 4 total Power Charges and 6 total Endurance Charges. After a few days of hurting my brain trying to figure out why I only ever saw a total of 4 End charges at the top of my screen, the mechanics of the build ended up being the reason: with Romira's, every time you hit, you get Power Charges. With Voll's, every time you get a Power Charge, you also get an Endurance Charge, but since I was capped at 4 power charges, I was only ever getting 4 Endurance Charges. Changing this to 5 max in each ended up being a big damage boost for Discharge as well as a decent defensive boost, so no matter what you go for, make sure you have a matching number of maximum charges. This was the biggest fuck up and game changer for me in this build.

Here's all my gear and skill tree as it was when I died: https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/cloudy2teen/characters

Here's what I was planning on trying once my Purity of Fire hit level 20 (6/6 charges, just enough regen for small positive regen): www.poeurl.com/PfO

Here's what I would do if you're thinking about an Elementalist Mjolner Discharge build without Righteous Fire (This should overall be tankier and do more damage since you save in not needing all the Life Regen, and over all a much less pain in the ass): www.poeurl.com/PfQ