69,000,000 DPS: Molten Strike Strength Stacker

Little disclaimer: I don't think this build is beginner friendly and don't recommend it to new players unfortunately. You will need to trade to pull this off. INTRO Hey, thanks for checking out the build, if you somehow got the PoB but haven't seen the video check it out here: https://youtu.be/NrNNo3wnApc I think I cover everything important about the build here so give it a read if you have questions since some stuff might be answered already! Forgive me if things are unorganized, I am not used to having to share these with people with the intention of them being easy to follow haha. BUILD REQUIREMENTS: So what do you need to get started and put this together yourself? Brutus Lead Sprinkler. This is the core item of the build, almost all of our damage is based on this line alone of "adds 4 to 7 fire damage per 10 strength". Unsurprisingly, the next important thing is to have tons of strength on your gear. I'm talking every rare piece of gear you have equipped on your character should have as much strength as you can get. In fact, you?ll even want to get a hold of synthesized items with the percent increased strength modifier as the implicit mod on most of your rares, but these range from pricey, to absurdly expensive. Just having the regular +50 or more strength on most of your gear will go a long way at first. As you farm up more currency, you can start to invest into these better bases for more strength. I would strongly recommend you start out as a juggernaut ascendancy. The free accuracy from this node is too good to ignore and the easy to generate endurance charges will make fitting in lots of strength easier since you won't need as much resistances to be capped out. Also, this Unstoppable node is seriously underrated. There are so many enemies these days that completely slow down your movement and feel terrible while just doing regular mapping that being able to ignore them is amazing quality of life. In fact, I even use a pair of forbidden jewels on my berserker that grant me Unstoppable when I'm just doing regular mapping because it feels so comfy being able to leap slam around freely. PASSIVE SKILL TREES There are multiple trees to choose from and different item setups for various investment points so that you can choose the tree that fits your needs. There are two good ascendancy choices for the build. Juggernaut is easier to get going, and is genuinely a comfier playstyle for regular mapping in my opinion, but has a lower ceiling for how much damage it can do as we're not going crit. On the other hand, berserker has a much higher dps ceiling, but at the cost of being squishier. That said, I think that if you have hundreds of exalts to put into this build, then berserker comes out on top as I'm pretty sure people could just invest their way into having the same, if not better, defenses as the jugg build. IF YOU CHOOSE TO GO JUGG YOU WILL HAVE TO UNCHECK SOME THINGS IN THE CONFIGURATION such as brittle, scorch, crit recently, and blitz charges. But you can add endurance charges in. I started the league off as a jugg and recommend you do the same, only having swapped to berserker now that I have enough currency to invest into crit. The pathing I use here is going to be the same regardless of which tree and ascendancy you go for and its weird shape is entirely intentional. What will vary is which clusters you pick up along the way. The keystone Iron Will over here is an absolute must and accounts for half of our damage when paired with Redblade Banner and Battlemage's Cry, or a Crown of Eyes helmet. If you don't have either of those set up yet, make getting them a priority. It lets strength give bonus damage to spells, which we abuse with one of those item combinations that makes our increased spell damage also affect our attack damage, essentially double dipping on our strength. Pick up the intelligence node Wisdom of the Glade if you need it, I did. If you're going the Juggernaut route, then you absolutely want to pick up the Precise Technique Keystone. At the cost of not critting anymore, you get a massive boost to your damage and it's totally worth it. If however, you're going berserker, then you will be going crit, and this would just make you way weaker. Point blank gives us a huge damage boost assuming we're hitting targets that are very close to us. This IS a melee build and we are getting up close and personal during boss fights. Versatile Combatant is an interesting keystone that allows us to turn some of our attack block into spell block at the cost of only being able to reach 50 % max of each instead of 75. Because we're getting lots of block from the Iron Fortress Unique chestpiece, it's not a bad idea to pick this up. If you're a Jugg feel free to grab the increased endurance or frenzy charges if you want to. The Call to arms keystone is essential for our battlemage's cry to not root us in place when we cast it. Don't ignore this. Naturally, as a strength stacker, I grab the attributes cluster here and take the 5% increased attributes mastery. The CRIT mastery I use is the 50% increased effect of non-damaging ailments so that I apply stronger brittles on bosses. Feel free to change things around and put more points into defense if you want a more well-rounded character. What I chose to do is not the be all end all way to do things. Experiment, and modify it to your own tastes. That's how you improve as a player and builder. JEWELS Hopefully you noticed, but I take all of the jewel nodes that are nearby since there are a lot of really important unique jewels that I want to fit in. First up is what I would consider to be one of the most important jewels in the game, the life gain on hit watcher's eye.This build needs it, in my opinion. If I had a ton of currency to blow on it, I'd also want it to have the chaos resistance while affected by purity of elements mod, but jewels like that are currently going for about 20 ex or so, which is out of my budget for now. The next most important jewel is Lethal Pride. It makes it so that all the nodes in the big orange circle give you bonus strength. You'll want to place it down in the duelist section and you're hoping to find one that will give your nodes extra increased percent strength. Also keep an eye out for nodes with intimidate or warcry buff effect. As no two lethal prides are the same, and there's no good way to preview them, you might have to shop around to find one that's good for you. Good luck! Next you'll want a pair of split personalities, they can both be the same or you could do like me and have one that gives life while the other gives you accuracy, the important thing is that they both give you strength.These go up in my left-most cluster jewel setup so that I get the most out of them that I can. In case you're unaware, the bonus these jewels give you depends on how many nodes there are between where the jewel is placed, and where your tree started out. That explains our funky pathing, avoiding shortcuts that would normally save passive points. Brawn is great but not essential, it gives me some increased strength, and mine is also corrupted so that I'm immune to corrupting blood, which is pretty important. This is definitely the cheapest jewel to get that on if you feel the need. Lastly are a pair of forbidden jewels. These can get pretty darn expensive but there are budget options that are quite useful. Unstoppable is good for mapping if you're a berserker so that you don't get slowed down as much by all those annoying slows that are in the game now. For bossing, or if you're just playing a jugg, I would go for the Hinekora node from the chieftain ascendancy: It gives us three things we love, strength, enemies are covered in ash, and fire damage leeched as life. The covered in ash one is particularly good as it means enemies take some 20% more damage and it's hard to fit that in elsewhere in the build. You could also be boring and just go for aspect of carnage (if Jugg). If you have a boatload of currency, you could go all out and get a pair of undeniable jewels if you're a berserker. Very expensive though. Finally for the cluster jewels there are a few important nodes we want to get. I went for two large cluster jewel setups and two medium cluster jewels, and if I ever got more levels on this character, I'd want to fit another one in. The large cluster jewels have a maximum of 8 passives, and I wanted any combination of these four nodes: Fuel the Fight, Weight Advantage, Overlord and Aggressive Defence. Fuel the fight gives the build mana leech, which is mandatory. Alternatively you could put a single point in the leech cluster near duelist, and that would do the trick on a tight budget. Weight advantage just gives damage and strength. Overlord is what gives us constant fortification, an important defensive layer worth adding to the build. Aggressive defense just adds to that. For medium clusters, I wanted something easy at first so I went with four or five passive projectile damage clusters that both had repeater and eye to eye on them just to get some more damage. Later on I swapped one out for this Exerted attacks jewel with Lead by Example and Provocateur that gives me some crit and near permanent onslaught. I also got a crit cluster jewel to help cap out crit as a berserker. Lastly, I have one small cluster setup, The Interrogation which gives us secrets of suffering allowing me to apply Scorch and Brittle to enemies. Only take this if you're a berserker. Scorch lowers enemies' resistances up to 30% which is a massive boost to my damage, and brittle gives me increased base crit so that all the other crit modifiers scale better. If you're wondering how the heck I'm able to get brittle on enemies since most of my damage is fire based, the answer is by using a Blizzard Crown Helmet which inherently gives a good base amount of cold damage to work with. GEAR We'll start with the uniques. Brutus lead sprinkler is our weapon of choice, and the item we're basing our entire build off of. Get one with good attack speed and decent crit if you wanna be a berserker some day. These are dirt cheap. Also, feel free to get any harvest enchant on there, anything is better than the normal quality bonus. The go to chestpiece is Iron Fortress. You'll want a 6-link one eventually but you could get by with a 5-link version at the start. Try and find one with a good strength roll on it if you can, say at least 100. At some point you'll want to make sure to get a white socket on there using the Vorici in research method, but if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I wouldn't worry about it too much. The reason for the white socket is to be able to swap out ancestral call support with slower projectiles support for when we are doing endgame bosses. Definitely not crucial early on. With enough strength (approx 2000), iron fortress will cap out both our attack and spell block at 50% thanks to the Versatile Combatant keystone from earlier. For the shield, I would definitely encourage you to go with Redblade Banner as it gives our Battlemage's Cry infinite power. Alternatively, you could go for a regular rare shield with life on block or something and use a crown of eyes as your helmet, but I tried it out and didn't like it. There are other uniques that definitely help out with getting your strength up early on, that you'll eventually want to upgrade to better rares: First off is the Astramentis amulet. This thing just gives us tons of all attributes and will be solid for a long time. I only replaced mine once I could afford a synthesised amulet with increased strength as the implicit, and then used Deafening Essences of Rage to get strength on there too. Finally, since it had an open prefix, I was able to craft on the non-channeling skills cost less mana. Totally worth it since we attack super fast and could run out of mana otherwise. For the annointment, I used galvanic hammer as a budget option and then upgraded to Natural Authority for even more damage. The next one is a pair of normal Alberon's Warpath boots. Gives us a good chunk of strength and some chaos res, which we'll never say no to. The only reason to upgrade these is because you got your hands on a pair of Strength Stacking boots that have the 2 to 4 fire damage per 10 strength mod on them, which can only be obtained in sentinel league by using recombinators on armour based boots and getting lucky. That mod alone accounts for 30% of my damage, so it's a pretty good upgrade, when you can afford it. The last one to mention is the cyclopean coil, which gives us some strength and some ailment immunity, but this gets beat pretty easily by a synthesized belt that you spam with rage essences until you get something with resistances, and that shouldn't be too out of reach. Also, I do run purity of elements, so the ailment immunity isn't that helpful. Of course, you could use either of the two OP unique belts here, I just don't have them. Next up, rings. What we're looking for is strength, life, and resistances, and room for another minus mana cost craft. The fact that my ring has the increased strength implicit, is not important unless you have 8 or 9 spare exalts to spend. I got mine on day 3 or 4 of the league, when it was only 1 exalt. You can get by fine with just regular rings, and you'll have an easier time getting your resists capped than me. Also, don't look at the Endurance charge duration implicit on one of my rings, it's completely useless; I tried harvest synthesizing for the first time and got screwed over. One small thing about all the accessories is that you'll want to use intrinsic catalysts on all of them to get the most strength possible out of them. My gloves are fairly simple but cost me way more in crafting than I would like to admit. The important thing is that you get +1 to strikes on these as your implicit so that it boosts your clearspeed considerably. I then just used more essences of rage to get the strength roll, and settled for something that gave resists I needed. The Fire exposure implicit is also neat. Getting the +2 to strikes isn't worth it in my opinion and ultimately made no noticeable difference in clear. Until you can get gloves with the +1 Strikes, I would recommend allocating (or annointing) the tribal fury node on the passive tree, which does the same thing. Finally, for the helmet slot, initially I just wanted any armour base that had the molten strike fires 2 additional projectiles enchant on it and I recommend you look for the same thing. Same story as the gloves, slap some rage essences on there until you get something good and then use eldritch currency to get some decent implicits like fire penetration for example. Eventually, if you're going for a berserker, you'll want to have a blizzard crown with that same enchantment. It's important to get a blizzard crown, because the added cold damage is what enables us to apply brittle onto the enemies, giving us more crit. You'll also want it to have warlord influence with the very specific elevated mod that'll max out our crit. "Gain Accuracy rating equal to your strength. 1% increased critical strike chance per 10 strength" Getting this mod is incredibly difficult and for that reason, these helms are stupid expensive. Until you can craft or afford one, the normal non -elevated version of the mod "gain accuracy rating equal to your strength" is enough to make it so that I don't have to invest into accuracy elsewhere. Flasks. You'll want a basic life flask with bleed removal and a dying sun for more AoE and projectiles. As a juggernaut, the rest of your flasks are optional, I opted for atziri's promise for some leech and chaos res, a granite flask for some extra armour and a silver flask with poison removal. As a berserker, you'll want a diamond flask with increased crit, a bottled faith, and whatever else you feel like. I just go for atziri's promise again. I like having automated flasks so I just put instilling orbs on them and make sure they have either used when full or used when attacking a rare or unique enemy, but you can go for whatever feels right to you. GEMS All the alternate quality and awakened versions I'll mention are COMPLETELY OPTIONAL upgrades, the basic versions will get you most of the way there. As a Jugg, In our 6 link chestpiece, while doing general mapping we want: Divergent Molten Strike, Multistrike, Elemental Damage with Attacks, Fire Penetration, Elemental Focus and Ancestral Call. When doing endgame bosses, swap out Ancestral Call for Slower Projectiles. It seems odd, but reducing the speed of our projectiles makes them overlap better so it's actually a very significant single target dps boost. As a berserker, our 6 link setups are the same as jugg except instead of using elemental focus, we want increased Critical Damage since ele focus would stop us from applying Brittle and Scorch. For auras, I have Purity of Elements, Determination and Anomalous Blood & Sand linked together with a level 3 Enlighten. Without the enlighten, you'll need to drop Blood and Sand unless you choose to grab the reservation cluster with Champion of the Cause. We also fit in a level 1 Vitality aura, just so that our watcher's eye from earlier is functional. Purity gives us resists and ailment immunities, determination gives us armour, and blood and sand gives us damage when we're in blood stance which is all the time. For utility we have quite a bit going on. Battlemage's Cry linked to absolutely nothing gives us a ton of damage thanks to Iron Will on the tree so we put that skill on our left click mouse button and our characters will automatically shout whenever they can. Leap Slam is the movement skill of choice. You WILL get stuck on fences and objects randomly and die because of it so it?s not perfect, but it is what it is. My curse of choice is Sniper's Mark for that sweet extra damage. I link this with Mark on Hit because I'm lazy and hate pressing too many buttons. You could choose to not use mark on hit. I have a Vaal Molten Shell that I use when I'm in trouble and otherwise I try to remember to use the regular version of molten shell whenever I can. Phantasmal Ancestral Protector linked with Culling strike is used whenever I fight a boss or tanky rare for some extra attack speed and to kill enemies that are on 10% life or less with cull. Berserk is used as a berserker, can't really generate rage reliably as a jugg so don't use it if going jugg. I have one level 1 cast when damage taken setup with a level 7 anomalous blood rage and a lvl 1 frost bomb. Blood rage gives us frenzy charges and attack speed and frost bomb just reduces the ammount enemies can regen their life. You could self cast blood rage and do more damage, but again.. Less buttons to press equals a happy Schwingy. That leaves a socket for whatever the heck you want. PANTHEON I take Soul of Arakaali and Soul of Shakari. You take whatever you want dude. DPS CALCULATOR Someone please correct me if this is wrong, but I use this molten strike calculator: https://tinyurl.com/5ae3jadh to find out how much dps I'm theoretically doing in a perfect world. I load up my character into PoB and put in the values it asks for and see what it says. Now for me, this number is quite large and it's always fun to see large numbers so there you go. Now you can see how strong your balls are too! Again, I know this is just a number and won't reflect real in game scenarios, I just thought I'd share it. LEVELING If you choose to level up your character as a molten striker from the get go, you're not gonna have a good time. I would stick with a two handed ground slam build until you can equip one or two brutus lead sprinklers at level 28, at which point I would swap to using molten strike and just going for the juggernaut skill gems and gear recommendations. Astramentis, alberon's warpath, a thief's torment ring and strength, life and resists on the rest of your gear will take you to maps easily. OUTRO Thanks for checking out the build! Feel free to ask questions in the video comments, I read all of them and respond to as many as I can. Cheers -Schwingy