HC Ward shatter ele

Hey all!

Wanted to share my Ward Shatter ignite ele I took to lv99.5 in HC mirage.

Quick breach map.

PoB

It's more of a 'as Mark intended' way of playing ward than the regenerative runes shenanigans I've seen going around. Also means you don't need the exodia heroic tragedy seeds to play it though, it gets going for the cost of a svalinn and an ynda's stand pretty much.

Very defensive setup featuring

• 27k ward with 1s restore
• 90 all res
• 89/91 block
• 86 evade
• Ailment immune
• Good phys mitigation (54k "armour" from Black Scythe Training, endurance charges and Shaper of flames 40% convert)

The basic idea is to invest heavily in avoidance layers to stop ward from ever breaking. Svalinn with some max block investment is by far the biggest contributor to that, but evade and bastion of elements definitely help. Ele spells have to get through primal aegis before breaking ward, while attacks are avoided 98% of the time.

When ward does break, I've invested a pretty unreasonable amount of stuff to not just fall over. Due to Cast on Ward Break cooldown recovery, your guard skill will pretty much always be up. A 3.6k life pool with good mitigation should get you through whatever is coming at you during the 1s restore delay. Obviously you still have ridiculous avoidance as well Practically speaking, I never even dropped low on this character. In a hundred pretty ridiculously rolled breach resonant cascade maps, I didn't notice ever getting hit with ward down.

As a ward build though, DoT is our achilles heel. Pantheon and DoT mastery help, as does 90 max res and ailment immune, but still.

Offensively it's golem stacking with primordial bond large clusters. This league we can reroll fractured primordial bond clusters which more or less makes up for the power lost due to the golem double tap nerfs. Since ward shatter doesn't take sockets, it allows us to comfortably fit everything. Usually quite an annoying problem for elementalist builds.

Couple random notes:

• Doedre's elixir + iron flask instilled with "Used when an adjacent flask is used" is amazing when mapping
• I hit the 73% ynda's in 1 volatile vaal orb. Very skilled
• For bossing, grace of the goddess is a lot more damage than obliteration
• Fire res is better for melding, I just happened to find this double corrupted amulet
• With the mana mastery and enduring composure rerolled on a mana reservation small cluster, you can fit lv30 aspect of the crab, which would be amazing for phys dot mitigation
• This concept can do a lot more damage if giving up some tank, especially life nodes and melding.
• Can't say for sure how well this character would boss as I never got around to it. My guess is pretty well, although damage is on the low side for ubers. Bosses with strong DoTs like shaper beam might not be so comfortable.