Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. I slept like crap last night so I find myself in a bit of a haze… which messes the foggy mess of nonsense that is going on outside today. I’ve officially entered the “playing with dumbass ideas” phase of the Necropolis league, and as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend leveling another Marauder. At this point, I am hanging out on the Oriath docks and nearing the push to finish the campaign. I think over lunch I might try and do the third Labyrinth and push through to the end so I can begin the “gearing phase”.
During the Ancestor League, I attempted to create a Shield Crush Chieftain. My idea was relatively straightforward… take the class that makes it easy to cap elemental resistances and then make it deal physical damage converted to fire damage. The above video is of some footage of me doing a T14 map and shows the state of that build as I managed to get it. You can check out the POB but essentially I was attempting to use Avatar of Fire to convert all of the damage that I was dealing to Fire Damage. It sort of worked… but mostly was less than exciting. However, with the Affliction League, we got a Transfigured version of Shield Crush that essentially was doing the thing I was trying to do… baked into the gem itself. My guess is that there are a lot of folks looking for build content for this gem, because my first Shield Crush Chieftain video that is titled that… has gotten more traction than it deserves.
However, once that seed was planted into my head… I wanted to give it a shot even if it also turned out to be a failure. I am being exceptionally lazy and running Forbidden Flesh/Flame combo to give myself Tasalio Cleansing Water which makes my overcapped Fire Resistance apply to everything else while running a Juggernaut. Other than that I am mostly stacking armor, life, and regen and a few sources that increase “attack damage” but not specifically “physical damage”. I am not where I am ready to do a proper show and tell of how things are going, and am just about to break out into a cluster setup over the next few levels. We will see how it goes but for right now… it feels pretty freaking good.
I am going down the Armor Stacking path which means I am running an Emperor’s Vigilance and a Replica Dreamfeather both of which are extremely cheap right now. I leveled using Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler but it started to fall off significantly the higher in level I got… since I am not explicitly stacking strength. I’ve picked up a Grasping Mail with the “armor increased by over-capped fire-resistance” explicit which is why I decided to do the forbidden flesh/flame combo. I think I paid 8 Divines for the one that I got which has over 1000 armor on it and a decent amount of evasion as well. I am also converting all of my Evasion to Armor through the Iron Reflexes keystone. I will likely take advantage of this when I pick up boots and gloves going for as high of both armor and evasion as I can find with chaos resistance and fire resistance.
At the moment I am running around in a Brass Dome, but only because I pulled one from the Forgotten Sage and figured I might as well use it. Also hilarious… you can equip a Headhunter at level 40 so I ran around with one of those for a while but I have no clue what my final belt is going to look like. Maybe a well-rolled Immortal Flesh since I seem to care about Regeneration. Last time around I went with Arn’s Anguish but I am not sure if I am going to be using anything that generates endurance charges. Regardless the build feels good right now and looks really cool because Shield Crush of the Chieftain has a much wider range than normal Shield Crush does… and once I get Fan the Flames up and running my ignites will start spreading. The biggest challenge is going to be getting enough stats on the few non-unique slots that I have.
By tomorrow I should have a good idea of how well this build actually works so I might do one of my videos showing it off. For the moment I am using a Flammability on Hit ring for my curse which seems to work pretty well, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have any chaos resistance on it. It was something that I picked up off the ground down in Delve and held onto.
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