[3.5] Crit Armageddon Brand Elementalist: 4M dmg
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I'm writing this guide close to the end of the league to share my take on Armageddon Brand build. I have had a great deal of success and fun clearing the game with my, hopefully, somewhat special take on this crit version of the build. 4M shaper dmg (2x brands attached) and 6.3k life seemed like a pretty good achievement to me.
I'm surprised to still see a lot of confusion there, with people that can't reach high enough dmg, try to go ignite, MoM, Ele Overload, 2ndary skills etc... This confusion is mostly caused by the popular builds shared by Mathil and RaizQ at the beginning of the league, from which I took a lot of ideas myself, but that are by no means optimized to reach full potential as they were born as league starters. I will assume a general understanding of the Brand skills mechanics in the following sections of the guide. Introduction
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In my opinion there are several options for this char: Life vs Energy Shield: I went for life, and I have to say I haven't had time to explore the ES version. Should still be perfectly viable. Crit vs non Crit: Scaling crit with Armageddon Brand requires a lot of passives and many good life or dmg nodes cannot be reached. The only way to still reach a good life total (I aimed for 6k) is to use Kaom's Heart as chest armor, which in turn means that a Staff has to be used to get the 6l. Going full crit requires squeezing in for gem slots, but gives you in turn much higher dmg. Going non-crit is the easy way to attain 7k+ life (or 6kish without Kaom's Heart) and still decent damage with Elemental Overload, which is why the build has effectively been used as league starter (also by me) with minimal gear requirements. 2h vs Dual wielding: As discussed above Crit->Kaom's Heart->Staff Ignite? Despite the feature of Armageddon Brand "Deal +1xx% more dmg with Ignite", which seems pretty damn good, going for burning dmg is not a good idea. It simply lacks in dmg, both in the crit and the non crit version of the build. Secondary skill? Once attached, the brands do all the damage without requiring interaction, so it's natural to think about using a secondary damaging skill(scorching ray, firestorm, winter orb etc) in the meantime. This is obviously impossible if you are going crit as you simply don't have enough gems slots, but can be done as non crit with 6l in staff and a 6l chest. You have to lose Armageddon Brand damage by going non-crit, but regain some of it with a secondary skill. Assuming you could gain something like 20% overall more dmg (to be demonstrated, I haven't tried), this would only occur when both skills are in effect. Plus, added complexity, clunkyness, risk. Could be useful for faster mapping or delving maybe, but still does not feels worth it to me. I took up the suggestions of Warlord's Mark and Aspect of the Spider given in Mathil's build Pro/Cons
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Pro:
- Great dmg, AoE and single target - Beginners friendly - Safe playstile - Surely not the best, but still pretty good at mapping - One of the best chars for Elder/Shaper/Uber Elder fights because of how steadily you can deal damage while avoiding attacks. Cons: - Can't run ele reflect, hexproof/no leech maps are annoying (need to manage flask charges very carefully) - Life sustain mechanics not suited for every fight as leech is rather slow and brand has the initial delay before activation. i.e.: Chimera smoke phase is a nightmare. Tree
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Kill all bandits
Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/jZAGzhwr Note that PoB does not show correctly the increased damage coming from "inc damage taken" and "- fire resistance" Gear
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Flasks: Various Notes
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I am using Faster Casting+Inc Area of Effect while mapping/delving and Combustion+Conc Effect for bosses. I only use the swap for special bosses, not regular map ones.
I don't really use Brand Recall so much, as the 1st meteor basically one-shots a whole pack of monsters but for sure it can be convenient and used instead of Lightning Golem. Last edited by cane_cane#3841 on Mar 3, 2019, 12:41:54 PM Last bumped on Mar 5, 2019, 5:47:36 PM
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Hi,
this seems like a really good build compared with the streamers one, but would you use it in HC? Maby with MoM? Also how would you level this? |
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" As far as survivabilty goes, like most brands builds, you rely on high life, endurance charges, slowing enemies down with aspect of the spider, and not getting hit. MoM is a good way to increase total life, but does not go well with crit, simply because you would not be able to get enough mana passives to have a decent mana pool. Even when I started off as non crit I ultimately chose not to go for it for this very reason. If I had to go HC I would go for non-crit version and Hierophant or Trickster ascendancies with MoM. The overall DPS would be something like 1/3 of what it is at the moment though. For leveling, as you can see from my gear I'm not investing much into crit chance so it comes quite nicely with the passives. However, crit dmg starts to kick in when you invest enough passives in it, so I would still stay non-crit with Elemental Overload (easy 30% more dmg) until I am high enough in level (I would say 70ish) to grab enough crit nodes. The nice side of it is your gear won't be affected by this change, so you can simply do the migration to crit with 3 respec points. As for the initial levels you can still follow the regular brands leveling guides or videos from streamers: it's really smooth and you can really go a long way through with a 4link and self found gear. |
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