[3.1] Juggernaut sword and board molten strike, fast effective can be real cheap

It's a decent 270-300 phys dps sword for cheap, it frees two points (iron reflexes and point blank), it gives two extra projs and molten strike loves proj numbers, it has really fast attack speed, it's just all and all an awesome sword. And it's a elder guardian drop only item, so it won't be extra expensive and even if you play ssf you can still get it quite reliably.

There are many replacement sword you can use before you get a grelwood, ichimonji, dream feather, or just some plain fast swords with decent phys dmg would do.

Does it have to be a sword? Well it's kinda have to, daggers and claws are not passive route friendly to marauder, and maces axes are not that fast.

Dirt cheap, good life, good armour, most importantly is that 25% phys to fire mod being a fixed roll, 85% without Avatar of fire conversion is very good, allow us to use fire pen gem effectively and that is a very good boss killing support gem, if you really want you can get 100% conversion by using a watcher's eye jewel.

Start with a 4 red one blue whatever chest, switch to tabula rasa, then get a 6L holy chainmail and essence a high life roll, eventually use a 6L astral plate to get a lot of resistances. Tabula rasa, holy chainmail, astral plate all have divination cards.

Mid tier life roll, high armour, fire dmg, this helm is also dirt cheap, best part about it is the situational freeze/chill immunity when you use a fire skill which molten strike is, because of that we get to use one extra unique flask.

Best enchant is still +3 molten strike projs, followed by molten strike dmg and ancestral protector bonus, shield charge attack speed is OK, but we are fast enough already. Since this is not a hot helm base, you need luck to find those items, better run lab yourself then.

Kaom's roots is the best, because I chose endurance charge + fortify + accuracy as ascendancy, what I don't have is stun immunity and "slow immunity", kaom's roots here basically let me take all the juggernaut points, so good. But before you fix resists, a good rare titan greaves is always a good bet.

+1 frenzy charge corruption is great for mapping, as enchantments go, there are couple of good ones, leech, crit chance if not crit recently (for ele overload), fire dmg if you killed recently, attack speed if killed recently , penetration if haven't killed recently all good choices, it's pretty loose here.

Use a rare gripped gloves, life, resists, attack speed, flat phys/fire dmg and accuracy, the more the merrier, and don't enchant, simple.

Stygian belt with wed ofc, abyss jewel is too good not to use. If you can manage your life pool and resists, darkness enthroned is really the best.

Jewelries you would want the ones with wed, flat phys/fire attack, life, resist, maybe some attributes, pretty generic stuff

We get freeze immunity from helm, then we want bleed and curse immunity, ideally on a life flask and a silver flask, that leaves use three slots to use unique flasks, The wise oak, atziri's promise, dying sun, taste of hate, kiara's determination are all good, ofc if you want to be defensive, granite and basalt can never go wrong.

wildfire x 2 of course

Watcher's eye is hard to get the right one, but when you get it it's so good. Gain extra% phys as fire is the best, then fire penetration, then fire conversion.

Abyss jewel is a great way to get flat damage increase, in this build, two abyss jewel with full dmg mods would be as good as anger, that is just insane, get the abyss jewels with phys/fire dmg to attacks, phys/fire dmg to sword attacks, life, oh and you really want one abyss jewel with "% chance to gain Onslaught for 4 seconds on Kill", that will give you almost constant onslaught.

Endurance charges and fortify are great defenses, and you have 1000 accuracy, this is truly one of the best class for this style of playing, almost facetanking everything.

In the order you should take then

Unflinching
Unrelenting(endurance charges)
Undeniable (accuracy)
Unyielding (fortify)

Oak, or two points if you want.

Major gods

Brine king (can't be stun if you stunned recently)before you switch to kaom's roots, Solaris (phys reduction against single target) after. Upgrade them if you can.

Minor gods

Shakari (reduce chaos) mostly, Abbereath (reduce fire) or Tukohama (phys reduction while stationary) when needed

Your main skill is molten strike, and this would be your main link.

molten strike + multistrike + ele dmg with attacks + ancestral call + ele focus

With ancestral call, molten strike is turned in to a very good aoe skill, your aoe coverage is actually much better than most aoe skills.

For the 6th link when you have a chest for it, you use chance to ignite,this gem gives more damage than added fire dmg as long as you have good source of flat fire attack damage even if you don't use that conversion shield, flat fire dmg which we get from anger and abyss jewels . Never use melee phys dmg to the skill, it will give you a big tooltip boost but it does nothing for your balls, balls are what matters for molten strike.

For single target, you switch out ancestral call and ele focus with fire pen and conc effect, conc effect is basically a must for bossing, not only you get better ball damage, it also restrict all your balls in a small drop area, effectively hitting the often big body boss many more times and significantly improves bossing dmg, fire pen on the other hand is good on one but not that effective against multiple bosses so switch or not according to the situation.

anger
herald of ash
blood rage
ancestral protector
flame golem
enduring cry

One of the biggest reason that I went sword and board is because of shield charge is so much better than leap slam and whirling blades. Both of those skills rely on attack speed rolls combined value, which is not that much but shield charge scales off your weapon attack speed and movement speed, this build just so happen to use a pretty fast sword. Another thing is, shield charge is an aoe skill, you can hit enemies before they hit you, to proc fortify it's just so much better and fortify is a big part of this build, and also ancestral call is best used when you have a certain distance, shield charge just fits so well.

Attention, already not using cwdt to trigger ele overload, this is kida pointless if you want to follow thru, it's a temporary measure, well I think still worth mentioning before you get the boot enchant, learn the mechanics not the posture.

From character example below you can see I use a EK cwdt to proc ele overload, it is not the best idea, but it keeps my ele overload going thru out mapping. Why EK you may ask, well I was think about cwdt cremation + desecrate, but I need to level conc effect gem and every build I played that needs gem switching I put the switching gem in glove's up right corner, it's just a QoL thing, EK happens to be a green gem spell that has 6% base crit. I did tested, cremation works about the same in mapping but so much better against bosses, but you need desecrate to create corpse sometimes.

Oh, and if you are thinking about volatile dead, just never mind, it's very shitty, the orbs have some kind of "idle time" and will not chase monsters in the beginning, when they start moving you already killed everything so what's the point?

Orb of storms is the most common method to proc ele overload, but for a juggernaut in a hard fight, you need to put down the protector totem, you need to shield charge to get fortify, you need manually warcry if you are not at max endurance charges, one less button push is always better.

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/3.1.1/AAAABAEBABzc2WEUdYVS9kj4648aG6r8S_ONYxcYkWhlogDz3fAfbyePYKcIBS3vTtl8l3lX4u0gMonAZuvu6hjBB2FShmA6UuXmKCrjn93Vd-UY24tPPC1254zPXz-bWASH4XOcxO8O2CQEswthMftWSIIH0284U3Ttz35nm3asDjwYXRRxPfzGrsVTwL-PmcABWGMyTjJ-dPG8n60JtyIt0oKbBTybamjymmquPjrYRre77QbG3DKa4JLQMtGQVUh4kc6HdoNfQKDXfkWd5FEBkfSDFCAS4VNSr2xQRzzvd9caOCcvRUetjcbYXaR9c14TIWBnoCKvSn167w==

Took out several life nodes for one extra jewel socket