Conc's 3.5 Jugg WS / MS build

[Concillian]

Thought I'd do a writeup of the builds I used for 3.5. This one is a Juggernaut using WS that has an easy swap to Molten Strike. I was planning on getting to level 91 or so, but spent one night doing breachstone rotas and pure breachstones in 3.5 offer a LOT of experience. I shot from level 89 to 95 in a matter of 2-3 hours. They have announced some nerfing to the experience from these for 3.6, and the betrayal mechanic being less accessible will also make the pure breachstones more rare, so level 91-93 is more realistic.

Wild Strike linked with Ancestral Call and anything else is simply insane in maps and just plows through hordes of monsters quickly. Single target is a little lackluster, and I struggled a bit with single target until I added Vaal Ancestral Warchief as a 2nd totem to complement Ancestral Protector. This helps shore up the weakness significantly on map bosses, incursion architects, and syndicates, primarily. Throw your two totems & war banner down as you approach, flask up and these go down much quicker than before adding the Vaal totem. In the endgame gearing, it's primarily only T16 maps that this is really an issue T14 and below for sure were fine without the Vaal totem.

For those longer boss fights (Izaro / T16 Guardians / Shaper / Elder,) I swap to my loreweave with Molten Strike Links, where Molten Strike shines like no other. It works well with the same tree, but alternately you can shift the tree around a bit to squeeze a small amount more damage. I went through a good 50 orbs of regret with small changes to the tree here and there... overall it's barely noticeable. Pick a tree and go.

The build was designed to have quite a low budget when you enter maps, working well with 1-5c gear in every slot, and grow into endgame easily, with no really expensive items outside of Loreweave & Xoph's Blood. My final gearset items were worth ~15-100c each, with the exception of Loreweave & the Xoph's Blood amulet, which I farmed myself with Pure Breachstones. I assume that drop rate of Xoph's amulet gets better with Pure Breachstones, because I got an amulet drop in 6 or 7 Pure Breachstones, and each Xoph kill yielded a blessing, so when I got a trash drop, like the bow, I could always use the blessing on it, and it would give back 10 shards when I vendored it.

Leveling I went straight to RT through Versatility, Strong Arm & Barbarism, then down to Duelist leech nodes by going through Art of the Gladiator, Dervish, Golem's Blood to the outer ring, and then to Vitality Void. Then the DW damage nodes and Scion life, then EO (refunding RT,) then Scion gem area, then linked the outside of the tree at Duelist and dropped all the small nodes between Dervish and Golem's blood to connect the Marauder outside and refund Strong arm and the surrounding nodes to get Heart of the Warrior, ele penetration and mace nodes, then added endurance charges and jewels and eventually dropped Vitality void for just the one leech node when I had enough damage gear.

Even though this was the 2nd character of the league and I had plenty of currency, I made a point to do some lab farming in a rare 5L just to prove the concept. It worked well when using molten strike on Izaro. WS on Izaro took longer, and would sometimes kill adds you didn't want to kill. Gluttony belt prior to the fight start to gain endurance charges is nearly a must, as you can't carry them in with you and the build is not really tanky at all without them... I learned that the hard way with a 2 deaths on buffed up 3rd trial Izaros.

Overall it felt really good mapping this with a relatively tanky character, and bossing with MS is also good. A well rounded character that really never felt underpowered. Probably anyone reading this here is past playing these kinds of characters and more on variant style characters, but I enjoyed the style, as this is my first full league with PoE.

It looks like Hatred will be changed a bit for next league and we will see how that will affect this type of character, but overall I feel this will still be quite good in 3.6.

Here are some pastebins of various combinations:
Generic Tree with Wild Strike & Shroud of the Lightless:
https://pastebin.com/2W209xXa
Generic Tree with Wild Strike & Loreweave: https://pastebin.com/j0kssh9r
Molten Strike + Xoph’s Blood & Loreweave: https://pastebin.com/QHeUxvjc
According to the Molten Strike calculator, this version is Shaper DPS: ~1.2M no flasks or totems / ~2.5M full buffs / ~3M if you're rich and are able to afford the helm enchant

You can switch around gearsets and trees if you like, but you need to take care of a couple things:

• MS is using Combustion support and Xoph's Blood, WS is using Elemental Focus and a rare amulet, so the config needs to be set correctly for ignite & covered in Ash for each set. All patebins disable blood rage, as that's mainly being used as an Arakaali trigger rather than for DPS.
  
• Wild Strike skill section has extra gems so you can look at mapping vs. single target configs if you wanted to say, look at swapping in a melee phys link for Ancestral call for a map boss by just checking / unchecking the respective gems.
  
• Lightless is a 5L and Loreweave a 6L, make sure skill gems reflect that.
  

Pantheon is Arakaali to take advantage of making the self DOTs stop (Immortal Call ends blood rage DOT, dousing flask ends nebuloch self DOTs, Forbidden Taste flask you just let if run out.) Minor god of Tukohama, we are phys mitigation capped at max endurance charges, but with no charges at the start of a fight we are only like 10% phys mitigation, this shores up our weakest point a bit if you stand still at the start of a fight to gain some additional mitigation, though I recommend leap slamming in to trigger fortify instead.