[2.6] Molten Strike Set the World on Fire

You got me thinking with that Xoph's Blood proposition, so I improved even further my lvl 90 tree suggestion (still using Eye of Innocence, but now Avatar of Fire seems WAAAY less costly) :
http://poeplanner.com/AAYAAPMhCwB3xthYYz38jM_2SF8_FCDvDlBH5FEaPvIvHOdqHtIh8kGCB9l8i0-baoVS2WFXDa2Nz352rJ7NpzCfywHnFE38S7yfGJE26BpVYSGE79rBRmmHKYjt-hjueuHvQzFXlxHVY3BgQb6nZU29Nkd-dO0FLXrvhmAirzhTdufzm2hl6hj3MnKprKpZ83IPZp760h0Ur40SaRcccXkYZRZv42oaOJBVJy8kqjbpgscdvjOHA-756EGHtz7-Cti9NZK18nJsbEYyCXzZxPYn7QYO1HwJ9sauPC2DzMQVg18uU9Nv-F9f0CGQ6hC_CCQ3FumYVwAAAAAA

Compared to the previous lvl 90 suggestion, that tree drop 25% life from the Scion wheel (easy to get if you want, like if you get lvl over 90 that's here that you will sink them most likely, and also you can take those earlier instead of damage mods if you think you need more life), for the following added benefits :
+ 1 jewel (best in slot would be 7% life, 8% attack speed with swords or 16% increased fire damage, 5% attack speed and 3% chance to ignite/5% increased ignite duration)
+ 40% fire damage (double dipping)
+ 1% max life per second regen
- 30 int (get back to the value of the lvl 77 build proposed by the OP) but + 30 strenght (so a bit more life and melee damage)
+ more flexible pathing

At this point I am pretty hyped, so if you want to go a different direction with your own build I might play this one myself.

That tree looks better to me than the last one. One thing I'd note is I'd probably grab Master of the Arena for the +2 weapon range. More important for cyclone, but still nice for infernal blow.

The biggest thing that worries me about rolling a build similar to this is the single target damage on IB. It generally feels pretty low, despite having pretty decent AoE, and feeling extremely satisfying when you explode half your screen.

Updated main post.

Kenakth : Double dipping works the following way. If you have 70% increased generic damage, your initial melee attack will hit for 70% increased damage. Let's suppose you have no other modifier, you hit for 170% now. So, the ignite inflicted, which is 20% of the hit damage per second (4% with Emberwake but let's forget that for now) will go from 20% of your first hit to 34% of you first hit (20% of your new hit). Except generic damage also increase the damage of ignite ! So instead of doing 20% of your new hit, you will do 34% of your new hit, which is equal to 58% of your first hit ! Basically, you gained 70% on your melee attack, but you TRIPLED your ignite damage. Now, ignite last 4 seconds (we increase duration, but let's also forget that for now).
So, on the non-increased hit you did 180% of your base damage : 100% from hit and 80% from ignite.
On the increased hit you did 170% from hit + 234% from ignite = 404% of your base damage.
404/180*100 = 224% of your first hit damage. So, with an increase of 70% you actually increased your damage by 124% (ok, the 200% from me was a little exagerated). Anyway, that's how you reach several million dps in PoE.

Now if you want I will explain you why our friend's build is highly viable.
By using Emberwake, his ignites deal 5 times less damage, but are allowed to stack. If he stacks more than 5, he is already gaining damage.
By using The Taming, he gains 10% double dipping damage per stack of ignite. So, if he stacks 3 ignites he is already doing more damage than with a vanilla igniting attack. But what if he stacks, let's say, 50 ignites on the same mob ? Then he gets 500% increased double damage. Meaning, each of his ignites now does more damage than a regular ignite, even factoring Emberwake (they reach 120% of regular damage, meaning 24% of the initial hit per second for a total of 96% of the hit within 4 second).
The initial hit hits for 6 time harder, is doubled by ignite => he hits 12 times harder. If we increase the ignite duration by 50%, he hits 15 time harder (and that makes it way easier to reach 50 stacks). So, if he was hitting 4 times per second with an average damage of 25k, he is not doing 100k dps (normal hit), he is not doing 180k dps (normal hit with normal ignite), he is doing 1500k dps.
In reality, it's a bit more complicated because all the increased are additive, then the "more damage" are multiplicative (sometimes on one instance, ex melee damage only increase the initial hit and burning damage only increase the damage over time ; sometime on both instance = double dipping like fire damage and elemental damage or generic damage). Overall I believe with the items he mentionned and the tree I proposed he could reach 1M dps.
Another important part of a build is the defense and I think my tree provide a defense slighly superior to his chieftain tree.
Then there is the mobility, only really interesting if you want to do competitive clearspeed (like I do). How much do we invest in mobility ? NOTHING, since it scales of attack speed. He get that for free while increasing his dps.

By the way, I love those kind of maths, but if you noticed I edited every single one of my posts because somehow I am shit at calculus and make a lot of mistakes, that's why I'm not mathematician atm :d

xD its a pain to keep track of all the little numbers. I updated the build using a level 77 version of your tree and its working a hell of a lot better in the DPS area.

I'm pretty good at math, but I had no idea it double dipped like that. I had assumed it would be limited to only calculate the increased damage once. That's pretty incredible... apparently I have some reading to do. That might fix the issues I was running into with the Razor of the Seventh Sun build I was considering as well...

In my opinion, that build should level extremely easily because you get Infernal Blow at lvl 1, start scaling damage right away and also scale your defenses right from the beginning. So you will have a very smooth increase in damage and defense over the playthrough. You are also scaling your mobility with your dps if you go attack speed (I swear it's worth it ^^).

Also, your CWDT setup got me thinking. I would suggest you use only two CWDT setup, the first being linked this way :
- cwdt lvl 20
- firestorm lvl 20
- chance to ignite lvl 20
- increased duration lvl 20

The logic is that each skill triggered by cwdt has a 250 ms cd during which it does not count damage.
Meaning you can at best trigger them 4 time per second (actually it should be closer to 3).
A lvl 20 firestorm with a chance to ignite of 70-80% (if you find the right jewels) and 100% increased duration will cast a fireball 40 times over 4 second ; let's say about half the fireballs hits the boss (this won't be needed for trash mobs, they will get destroyed by normal attacks in no time), that's 5 fire hits per second so about 3 ignites per second (at worse), and those last 8 second. This means one firestorm will stack 12 ignites by itself.

An unbuffed firestorm deals about 600 per hit with our tree, multiply that per 7 when you have 50 stacks, that's 4.2k or if we consider 20 hits at total, 82k damage per cast.

God that build is complicated...

Let's consider you are inflicting a lot of ignites (you already have 3 per second from one firestorm and 3 per second from attacks with 4 attacks/sec (I'm not taking any odds since you don't have 100% chance), and the boss helps you take damage (you don't care because you regen 40% of your life per second with lifeleech + regen and have flasks if needed - but actually the more ignites you inflict the more you regen because of the blade passive). I would suggest a Cherubim Maleficence as body armor since you don't use Vaal Pact, to improve lifeleech since you are percentage capped.

So let's continue, if you cast 3 firestorms per second (best case scenario), and since they last 4 seconds, you can stack 12 firestorms if the fight last more than 4 seconds (but will it ? xD). At that points you are (still taking the previous odds as true even if the variance is high, yet mitigated by the sheer number of possible hits) inflicting 39 ignites stacks per second. 36 of which have a base duration of 8 second (so they stack up to up to 288 !) and 3 of which have a base duration of 6 second and will stack up to 18, that makes us reach the 300 stacks limit after we had 12 firestorms up for a total of 8 second, meaning about 12 seconds after the start of the fight (did I say 50 was a nice goal ? Oh boy was I wrong !).

EDIT : I fucked up my first calculations by accounting for only one ignite per firestorm/second instead of 3 per second, so everything that comes after is irrelevant. I will still let it (in spoiler) because it took me an hour to calculate -_-"



From that wrong maths we will retain that a second CWDT Firestorm socketed with the curses is pretty nice. And actually you can forget about that totem, let's get crazy and go to 3 firestorm CWDT ! That is about 150 ignites per second, so you heal yourself of 300% of your max life per second if the fight last more than 4 seconds. Maybe you don't need the Cherrubim (I still think it's good because you are losing 4000 hp per second from the Eye of Innocence only at that point, without accounting for ennemy damage). Also, because of all the previous calculation, we know that you can reach the 300 stacks by taking only a single instance of damage (above 3k) per second, since it would trigger 3 firestorms per second and those are enough to reach the cap if we account for the curses.

Your last sockets are on the sword with the auras. You put a stone golem in it. What about replacing that Stone Golem with a Vaal Lighning trap ? That way, you apply Shock on ennemy bosses (those that are not immune). It will last about 6 seconds but still you have 3 charges, that makes for an uptime of 18 seconds. Plenty time. Now what does shock do ? Well, it causes the shocked target to take 50% increased damage (since we don't have any increased damage on them it's actually 50% more damage for us). Since the trap leaves shocking ground, it applies shock on any non-immune target, bypassing all resistance and duration check. Oh, by the way, those 50% more double dip so it's actually 125% more damage on ignite damage (and at this point, most of our damage comes from ignite anyway). So I think it basically doubles the dps of the build.

Now, how much DPS do you actually do when you stack 36 firestorms with a 3000% double dipping damage increase and you double everything up ? Well, first we have to remember that we are limited to 300 ignite stacks (Boring ! We could reach 1000 easily). 18 of those stacks will come from your over booster attacks, and 280 of those will come from Firestorms between lvl 18 and 20 (or 19 and 21 later in the league).

If your initial hits, that I assume are around 25k (from the calculation showed by OP), are amplified by 300%, an increase of 3000% due to the 300 stacks will multiply them by 8, or 12 when you include shock, so your basic attacks hit for 300k each. Then the ignite damage will be multiplied by 12 and since it was doing about 20% of your initial hit damage per second (estimation here), it now is around 240% of your initial hit dps so you should be dealing 4*300 = 1200k main hit damage, and 18 x 2.4 x 300 = 12 960k (WTF ?) ignite damage from attacks.

Then we can factor the damage of the firestorms. Since we reach full stacks no matter how many we cast per second, I will calculate the firestorms dps in the worst circonstances, (you cast only 3 per second) using lvl 19 basis ; then you can just triple that in the best circonstances.
I said earlier an unbuffed firestorm hit is about 600 damage, with only a 90% increase from tree and ascendancy, and a 40% more buff applied from ascendancy too. Aberath's Hooves add 20%, so about 10% damage (double dipping, but let's forget about this for now, most of us won't get them anyway).
With 3 firestorm cast per second we hit 60 times per second because we don't have any AoE increase, so firestorm hits often. Maybe 50% hits is optimistic, maybe it's closer to 30%. Let's assume my calculation are optimistic, or only works against fat bosses. Even if you only reach half that dps, we are ALREADY at 7M from attacks alone. So, about those firestorms damages : with 300 stacks, they deal 15 times more damage on main hit, or 22 with shock applied.
That means they deal : 60 x 600 x 22 = 792k dps from main hit. Disapointing ? Let's remember those firestorm are providing 90% of our ignite stacks, so respect them !
Then comes into play the ignite damage from those hits, which we already calculated before so it is (600 x 22) x 280 x 2.4 = 8870k dps.

In "bad" conditions, you should therefore deal 20M dps. I have never seen that, so it's better to assume I am wrong and you deal like, one third of that, so about 7M. It is STILL top tier and an end-game eraser.

What about the best conditions ? If you cast 9 firestorms per second instead of 3, they will hit 3 times more but you wont generate more ignite, so you can only multiply the direct hit by 3, adding another million for a whooping total of 22M dps. Three time more works and your dps only increases by 10% ? Well, it's not like you were casting those spells by yourself, is it ? Also, you would ignite three time more so heal more life (about 100 more ignite per second so 200% more max life healed per second). Basically, only your defence scale with the intensity of the damage tanked, which is exactly what you want since you already have an insane DPS that ramps up pretty fast.

So, I was planing to make a Champion Viper Strike build for next league but I might go with Infernal Blow Berzerker instead, because it seems to be stronger in every aspect, have a higher ceiling, and cheaper gear (except for Aberath Hooves but those are not really necessary, just a luxury item like Skyforth for other builds).

The only thing that I am not sure about is if The Taming works correctly with Ignite stacking from Emberwake. Would be a shame if it did not. Since I am not planing on starting league with that build (I have my own already approved build for that), I hope you will let us know how well that build performs live :)

First of all, goddamn man, your math gave me a headache just thinking about what you did to yourself. Thanks for the assistance, and I hope you find as much fun with the build as I have been.

Now, The Taming and Emberwake do stack. Each ignite on each enemy gives 10% increased damage. There was a mistake in your calculations in regards to that. Although the single target math remains the same the mobbing skill is missing a few hundred stacks of ignite.

For the purpose of calculations I am taking these as law

A pack of regular monsters: 10 in total
How many the character can hit with melee splash: 6 in total

With a single attack I can hit 6 monsters 3 times each. That should proc 6 ignites that spread to all 10 enemies for 60 stacks. 60 stacks do 1500 damage after resists are accounted for. Considering that the skill does this 3 times, 180 stacks up to 4500 damage.

This can in theory scale up really crazy.

20 monsters hitting 10 scales the ignites to almost 600 in total (10 ignites * 3 hits = 30 hits * 20 monsters = 600 ignites)

Single Target is what is making it difficult to decide. The lower level firestorm will proc more ignites and thus more heals when it comes to bossing. The higher level firestorm will proc the same amount of time (I can set the damage to 1 hit proc) with

Firestorm(14) - CWDT(11) - Chance to Ignite - Elemental Proliferation

This has firestorm trigger at just under 1500 damage. Which in theory should trigger on the first and third attacks while mobbing. Ill run some numbers to do comparison later tonight when I get home.

My maths were very wrong, though pretty good overall (one mistake is enough). I edited everything, it should be good now. DPS is even higher than I expected, and the ceiling is actually easier to reach.

Also, I see your CWDT maths are on point ^^ I always yolo that part because it is a lot of assumptions. Like, you have to suppose you can hit 10 monsters with one attacks, maybe you can, I don't know. My personnal way of thinking is that it does not matter because your damages are high enough that you should one-hit every mob pack up to T16 with Multistrike and the ignite spreading. You won't even need a single firestorm to trigger.

I think, even if I might have been pretty confident in Firestorm, that you should consistently reach a 4M dps on the Shaper after a quick ramp-up (the best way to reach that dps is to facetank his beam attack, though the frosbolts works too).

Also, I underestimated quite a few things. The REAL optimal DPS, against a double life mod Hydra guardian that keep barrage-shotting you in a less AoE map, could be over 30M. Which is useless, because anyway he will blink arrow away. Minotaurs attacks are too slow for the optimal firestorm procs. Phoenix is immune to ignite. Chimera is annoying as hell (could also proc optimal dps because he attacks fast, but he still has 4 phases + the smoke parts). And boss below t16 rarely have over 1M life, meaning a 1M DPS is still high enough to wipe them from the screen cleanly. And the Shaper is immune to shock.

Gave the build some thought. With the self-inflicted damage imposed it would most likely be better to put molten shell and immortal call on the same 4l setup with CWDT and increased duration. This allows the other 4l to be a firestorm setup. I did the level 14 firestorm, 11 cwdt, with elemental proliferation and chance to ignite.

In theory the level 11, (1500 damage to proc) should be enough to keep it up against mobs, but low enough that I can tank a few hits from a boss to get the ignite train rolling.