[2.6] Burning Half Naked Man Terrorizes Coastal Community - Life RF/SR Budget-ish HC All Content

Pros
- Extremely high life and regen
- Clear speed is quite fast for such a durable character
- No 6 links, no super expensive gear
- Near zero mana use allows for very flexible aura setups
- Playstyle is very straightforward, allowing you to focus on positioning and otherwise not dying
- You're not exactly breaking new ground but at least you aren't running some energy shield raider like all those plebeian sheep

Cons
- Damage is not super high. You will have to understand end game boss fights and actually play through their mechanics instead of cheesing your way through via huge dps.
- There is a definite gear ceiling. The flipside of being relatively inexpensive is that there aren't many big money items that are going to drastically improve the build.
- Reliant on endurance charges but has no way to generate them quickly. This can be a liability in some boss fights.

I don't actually consider those first two real downsides, because I like having time to appreciate boss fights and a cheap build means I can afford all my other much more awful ideas. The endurance charge thing is annoying though.

As promised, most of the gear for this build is going to be pretty cheap. The gear on my standard demo character linked below is mostly random stuff I had lying around from various old HC league characters. There are only a few absolutely required items and of them only one is expensive.

Generally speaking, we want life, strength, resists, and maybe some dex or int to save on passive points. Further breakdown by gear slot:

Righteous Fire - Increased AOE - Conc Effect - Elemental Focus -- Stick that in an essence of horror helmet and everything but bosses or very durable rares should die almost instantly. You could use increased burning damage in place of increased AOE but the loss in radius is a big drop in quality of life. Also, for some bosses like shaper it's going to mean way less real DPS because you can't always get that close to them.

Scorching Ray - Controlled Destruction - Elemental Focus -- Into Doon Cuebiyari for an effective 4l. This skill is for helping to wear down big targets more quickly, or in dire emergencies or unfamiliar fights, to serve as your ranged damage while RF is off and you're regenerating 30% life per second. Never get yourself killed trying to keep the stacks up. Your durability means that you can afford to turn every fight, even shaper to some extent, into an endurance race.

Shield Charge - Faster Attacks - Fortify - Enduring Cry -- Obviously enduring cry has nothing to do with the rest, we're just low on sockets. This provides pretty reasonable bursts of move speed while keeping instruments of virtue triggered and giving you even more durability through fortify. Against single targets that you want to facetank, your awful hit rate may require you to spam it in order to trigger fortify.

Orb of Storms - Inc Crits - Curse on Hit - Flammability -- This more than doubles your RF damage against pretty much everything by triggering EE and EO constantly. The increased crits is maybe debatable if you have 120% crit from boots, but even then I'd leave it on because EO procs a lot less against single targets without it

Auras and other utilities -- You only need a tiny sliver of mana to work with because your regen is quite good without any real investment, and nothing you use costs much. Obviously purity of fire, but after that, another purity, vitality, whatever else suits the situation. Or you can leave some mana free for decoy totem, some kind of golem, immortal call, etc.

Keep in mind that while you'll get a long duration immortal call, you're throwing away a ton of regen and enduring cry is the only way you're getting those charges back. This is almost never necessary except if you want to blindly charge through porcupine packs in high tier maps.

You're going to spend most of your time with RF up, shield charging between packs and alternating between enduring cry and orb of storms. Orb will proc elemental equilibrium, elemental overload, and flammability. Your high life and regen along with fortify, block, endurance charges, and constant movement means that very few things are going put a dent in you. If you see a particularly big or nasty pack up ahead, you mash your utility potions for even more durability and damage. If even that isn't doing it, you douse yourself for another ~12% hp regen per second and wear things down from a distance with scorching ray.

Take a look at the phoenix or shaper videos linked below for some pack clearing demonstrations. The rest of the videos are just the boss fights.

A brief rundown of the skills:

RF - The wiki describes the mechanics of righteous fire as well as I can. This skill is a great method for suicide unless you're geared toward it, at which point it allows you to turn stacked defense into offense. Obviously this is ideal for hardcore/deathless oriented people.

SR - The wiki describes the mechanics of scorching ray almost as well as I can (I think). The one thing I didn't get until I played with the skill myself is that it's not up to 8 separate debuffs each on their own 1.5s timers that are expiring out of your control, it's a single increasingly strong debuff that will persist until the affected critter has gone 1.5 seconds without being hit again by the ray. The point being, you have that window of time to stop casting, avoid getting killed by <whatever>, and resume casting with no loss of damage or debuffs.

As mentioned above, your damage is not going to instantly kill bosses. You will have to wear them down. The upside is that most bosses are very unlikely to kill you unless you play like an absolute idiot. With all your charges and auras up you can eat attacks that are instant death for most builds and be back to full health before they attack again. There are three basic approaches, each one is some tradeoff between damage and defense:

1) Point Blank Hadouken (highest dps) -- Dance around until you have your endurance charges built up, shield charge in to fortify, drop orb of storms and use SR. Use flasks as needed to reduce your incoming damage or increase your regen. Spam shield charge if you need to refresh fortify, keep orb up, use enduring cry. Main goal is to stand on their toes and never stop SR long enough that the debuff wears off.

2) Prancing Lad (balanced) -- Gather your endurance charges, get close enough for orb of storms and RF to affect the target, but don't bother with fortify or SR unless you know you've got a window. Focus on constant movement and enduring cry, don't sweat SR debuffs dropping off. Be ready to douse yourself and run away if you eat a big hit. You won't kill anything big quickly this way but you're doing constant damage and keeping yourself pretty safe.

3) The Learning Corner (safest) -- Switch off RF, keep your endurance charges up, stay at a distance and use SR and orb of storms when it seems safe. Your dps is going to be pretty pitiful but your life/regen and mobility should make you nearly invincible. Apart from a very few high tier or end game bosses, you would need to try to get killed under these circumstances. This is very helpful for practicing the rhythm of new or unfamiliar boss fights.

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAUBAAHcAecEswUtBg4J9gxSDF8NzRLhFCAUTRhWGJEZLhpVHKcczhzcJ-0o-imLK1AuUzLRNZI26DrhPAU8LT38QYdDyEVHRZ1Hfk3jTwRQR1NSU6VVtVZIVw1YY1ugXz9hIWSjZU1oZWh0aPJ07XrvfA6AMIIHgseDX4PMhNmE74cpjM-PGpHOlmyYrZrgm26ce57Nn8uiAKLqplenCKcwp1Woua2Nr6e3PriTu-28n702vqfAZsEExFjE9sauz37SIdNv1HzYJNi92WHZfNpi2sHfhuvu7WHvDu988B_yQfJF85v2SPno_Ev-Cv5U_o8=

Not much to say here. The progression is templar->marauder->duelist. Entirely fill out each area before moving on to the next. Level 90 is where I'd call it pretty much done and ready to go up against shaper.

It is entirely possible to level with RF as soon as you get a ruby flask and an overflowing chalice. I've done it many times in hardcore, though if you're new I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

Chalice is critical because earlier in the game, there aren't nearly as many mobs to refill your flasks with and you need nearly constant flask uptime to make up for your lower regen and fire resistance.

Otherwise you can simply level with scorching ray-CWC-firestorm or something equally generic. Make sure not to pick up elemental equilibrium until after you're done using hits for dps.

This build is meant to be able to handle everything, and it definitely can. You aren't invincible though. If you screw up enough you absolutely can die against end game bosses or heavily modded map packs.

Videos below are average runs. No editing or choosing the best of many takes. You'll see me screw up quite a bit and survive it thanks to the build's durability.

Atziri - This one is mostly cake. Getting to her is easy so long as you have a bleed flask ready for her trio. Her flameblasts and physical skills aren't going to be very dangerous. You definitely can die to lightning if you let multiple blasts hit you. Run purity of lightning, have topaz flasks, prance around. Positioning and movement are more important than anything else in this fight. One very important thing is to make sure you're overcapped enough that the reflected flammability curse doesn't tank your fire resistance. Otherwise, take it out.

Chimera - video - Make sure you go into the fight with endurance charges up. You should be able to play this point blank. Keep fortify up. Kite his packs. Don't stop to cast orb of storms against them unless you're at full health. They'll die eventually and there's no time limit. They can do a ton of damage if you hold still. You will want to point blank the bleed dog once he's alone, because it's very hard to keep him from puncturing you while kiting and your anti-bleed flask isn't going to hold up long enough.

Phoenix - video - Take it slow, prance. Be ready to douse toward the end of the fight because his -fire resist debuff is going to screw up your regen rate. Overflowing chalice is very helpful in keeping your flask charges up with the help of the constantly respawning birds. Finish him off with SR if you aren't confident about getting in close. With RF off he isn't going to be able to kill you unless you really ask for it.

Minotaur - video - Keep your endurance charges and fortify up, play mostly point blank. You can regen through all of his melee attacks, but you want to avoid standing still for avalanche slam because it's possible for rocks to fall shortly afterward and 2-3 shot you with little chance to regen. Remember that overflowing chalice will remove the shock but not the move speed debuff from the electric fence. His rock golems will provide you a constant stream of flask charges. With good chalice use you can have ruby and basalt up when you need them.

Hydra - video - Run purity of ice and bring a sapphire flask. This one is easy. Hydra is terrible at dealing with mobile close range characters. Prance, don't be afraid to eat an orb so long as you've got healing flasks ready. Use chalice during the water add phase if you need to refill.

Shaper - video (turn the volume down on this one) - This one is pretty tough. It's sort of a dps race in that you will steadily lose more and more of the ground to vortexes as the fight drags on, and dragging fights on is unfortunately our main deal. Also, even with 9k life he can kill you with a badly timed hit if you're already low from running through degen. The more time he has to get lucky, the more risk you're running. I would 100% recommend that you practice this fight repeatedly in standard before trying it in hardcore or a league where your wealth is more limited. If you can't do that, study some videos really carefully. The timing and patterns are really important, especially for dodging his slam and kiting vortex orbs out before jumping to Zana's shield.

It's not all bad though. The upside is that you have the regen and life pool to deal with all of his abilities individually and buy yourself the time that you need to wear him down. You can very easily kite a train of vortex orbs around while still dealing good damage with RF, then drag them off to a corner when you have an opening. If you do screw up and get a vortex on Zana's shielded area, you can switch off RF and pop flasks to stand there without losing life.

Uber Atziri - This one is viable but there's no way I would do it in hardcore unless I was tired of the character. I'm not sure there's any build except maybe an extremely tricked out ES guardian that can afford to screw up much in these fights. As you can see from the other videos, making mistakes is pretty much what I do. Overall the fight is basically the same as regular atziri except you need to play like an absolute coward and never stop moving.

The trio may actually be scarier than atziri herself. The fire guy is the one you want to kill last, but that leaves you with a bunch of vulnerability whip guys to dodge. Fortunately you will have a ton of flask charges to kite around with from the constantly spawning adds.