What are Self-Found Starter Builds that can scale to all content?

I'm trying to look for builds that can progress through the entire game on self-found gear, but also do end game content. I'll be partying with my SO through this so we'd be sharing loot.

The builds I'm thinking about right now are blade vortex and firestorm. Only concern is I heard firestorm can't really do end game content.

Any thoughts on blade vortex? Or any other builds that would be good for what I'm looking to do? I'm not looking to build a character, farm and restart another character. Also this is Breach softcore.

Blade Vortex is "doable" selffound, but it kinda needs rather costly or in your case rare items in the later stages of the game.

Imo in a consistent party of 2 your best bet is one of you going for some kind of aurabot boosting the others output significantly.

That being said, most totem builds are "easily" doable selffound, like for example Flameblast totems, warchief or simply flame totems.

There are builds ofc that scale better or worse with aurabots, an elemental blade flurry inquisitor for example scales nicely with all the flat elemental dmg boni an aurabot can provide.


Selffound is always a challenge and it really depends on either of your strenghts and more importantly focuses.

Firestorm is easily done self-found yes and it CAN do most of the endgame encounters but firestorm builds tend so put a strain on your fps (especially when you crit lager groups of monsters).

Edit: as for aurabot skill setups, you want to use most if not all of the "purity of X" skills and the elemental dmg bonus auras along with hast like Hatred + Anger + Haste + Purity of XYZ, some of those with blood magic on your life, the rest on your mana and maybe a curse like enfeeble to reducse incoming damage.

Self-found, including no pulls from earlier self-found characters' finds, is quite difficult and imposes enormous limitations on what you can reasonably expect to do. You basically have to forego the existence of all unique items ever, as there's no guarantee that you'll be able to self-find the one singular unique item whose special property your build otherwise hinges on.

All weapon-based builds are out, and a large number of spell-based builds. I would tentatively consider Vortex, though. It's quite a solid skill on both offense and defense, it can do most of its job without any specific uniques and the only unique it really likes (Pyre) is common enough that you might find one self-found if you play the league a ton. The Frostbolt interaction also lets it retain a great deal of flexibility in placement that can save your butt in the inevitable bad situations self-found challenges will put you into.

As Sumo mentioned, someone playing aurabot to the other's attack build can be beneficial, if also intensely boring for the aurabot player. It'd be about the only way to guarantee reliability from a weapon-based build like Blurry, though. Self-found temp league pretty much always means you play in butt-tier gear for the entire league, save for maybe one or two good pieces you find that will inevitably be better for other builds.

Hmm what if I changed this question to, selffound during leveling stage but we can trade when we get to maps. I dont want to bog down the lveling stage with too much trading but i think at map stage, it should be fine

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mrutomi wrote:

Hmm what if I changed this question to, selffound during leveling stage but we can trade when we get to maps. I dont want to bog down the lveling stage with too much trading but i think at map stage, it should be fine

During leveling stage almost anything is fine, take a firestorm gem, put faster casting and spell echo on it and you are good to go till the end of cruel, maybe even till lake farming in merc.

Bladevortex is a nice closerange tanky build if your partner wants to go ranged.


Still a self-found weapon build benefits immensely from an aurabot and the aurabot him-/herself benefits greatly from some traded items like a shavronnes wrappings for example...


I cannot stress the easiness of totembuilds tho, you can easily level your character with firestorm till lake meciless and then switch to something like flameblast totems with the items you found and maybe some traded ones.

Alternatively, you and your SO can both go with triple Warchief totem builds and then just laugh and laugh and laugh at both the hilarity of watching an army of angry ghostmen smashing everything to paste, and also how stupidly simple it is to smash everything into past with Warchiefs.

Srsly. Watching 6+ of those things going off at once is Great Lulz.

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1453R wrote:

Alternatively, you and your SO can both go with triple Warchief totem builds and then just laugh and laugh and laugh at both the hilarity of watching an army of angry ghostmen smashing everything to paste, and also how stupidly simple it is to smash everything into past with Warchiefs.

Srsly. Watching 6+ of those things going off at once is Great Lulz.

yeah that is also a very viable and fun alternative.

Just asked my wife about totem build and she didnt seem interested. She seems to like stormcaller and flashier builds. Any flaahy build that might dit that description and isnt totem?

So far I've done:

Freezing pulse scion (Perandus; lackluster clearspeed but I only played it about 80 hours)

Dual bladefall totem chieftain (Prophecy)

Flameblast CI occultist (Essence)

All of these have reached maps and the last two have reached and beaten T15 maps under their own power. I guess flameblast is sort of flashy? At least it creates big blasts and kills entire packs at once. I imagine it would also work with a number of other fire spells.

Essence drain is pretty easy to do. Even more so with the new leveling gem blight. I might actually give it a try later... just to be able to run all map mods. And when I say all, I mean each and every single one of them.