I posted here a few weeks ago about recovering some of my Armageddon Brand Ignite damage after the patch (I went from about 3mil to 300k). Here is my current character loaded directly into PoB with minor skill tree tweaks.

A lot of people told me to abandon the build, that it was dead etc. I knew I had shitty gear and even after the nerfs I can still kill A9 Conquerers with low mods. I know that the damage and survivability is there for this build, I just need help finding it. The map clear on this build feels amazing, and it's quite tanky I just need some better gear and jewels.

Today I come to you with a new pitch for where I will get my damage from and another request with help getting that damage to reflect accurately in PoB.

Fire medium clusters lost their dot multi and it became just burning damage. The loss of the DoT Multi is where I lost most of my damage back. So I started looking at other clusters to scale damage differently when I came across the Critical Strike medium clusters.

They have:

Haemorage +10% to damage over time multiplier for crits 30% increased Crit

Eye of the Storm +10% to Damage over Time Multiplier for Crits 40% Increased Critical strike chance.

There is also a new support called "Critical Strike Affliction" support which gives +93% to Dot Multi for critical strikes at 20/20.

My DoT Multi for Non crits is around 200, and that's sufficient to quickly clear maps. Where I need the DPS is on bosses. The way ignites work is only the biggest ignite deals damage at any given time.

Now there are some nuances going on with my build.

Armageddon brand is not like other ignite applying skills. All other ignite skills require additional input from the player to reapply the ignite but a single Armageddon Brand will apply multiple ignites to a target over it's lifetime. This repeated igniting allows us to use Replica Emberwake without the lowered duration feeling bad and it lets us get back the "Ignites you inflict deal damage X% faster" we lost on cluster notables.

That is what made me think about how fast my Armageddon Brand hits. If it hits fast enough to crit consistently before my "critical ignite" duration runs out then functionally on bosses my ignites always use my crit ignite multi to deal damage.

Issues: I can't use Elemental Overload and I had to swap out Unbound Ailments for Critical Strike Affliction. I swapped Unbound Ailments because it had the lowest Multiplier.

There are other upgrades I'm still farming to get, like Transcendent Mind (I just need the altar, I have the jewel and vials), a +2 gems amulet (Awakener orbs are 10-14ex on console but that's all I need, I've already rolled the amulets to awaken together), and a flammability on hit ring.

I also have been toying with the idea of swapping out of blood magic, maxing out my reserved mana and using Eldritch Battery for my spell casting.

I've also got a Divine Flesh timeless jewel I've thought about using, but I need block/dodge if I'm gonna do that. It would also let me quit using my Legacy Loreweave and get a better chest. It is possible for me to get to phase acrobatics and acrobatics if I swap to EB and move my clusters to the opposite side of the tree, so I might look into that. I just have to be careful with Divine Flesh because currently a lot of my survivability comes from the 2500 life Elemental Aegis, and taking DF will make half the elemental damage I take go to my life instead.

Any advice or tinkering offered would be greatly appreciated. I've scoured tons of other builds and have my mind on the items I need from them, but most people just gave up on ignite and there definitely isn't anybody doing a crit ignite build that I can take inspiration from.

I've spent a lot of time on this build (compared to other stuff I play) and it's one of my favorite I've ever played. Before the patch I comfortably maxed out my atlas with it and had started dipping my toes into doing The Hidden fights. This is also the first character I've ever beaten a Sirus higher than A5 on.

I know that somewhere in the complexity of this game there is a way to reclaim this character's damage to pre-patch levels. I just need some help finding it, and I hope my strange build choices will inspire you as well. I do have a budget of around 45ex, but that won't buy me as much as it will on PC.