Hey guys,

I'm finally ready to share my Facebreaker ritualist. No Way of the stonefist shenanigans, just pure physical powerhouse with maces. I invested around 50div in this build so I guess you can say it's not cheap but also not very expensive.

For mapping, I use mace strike with the new Concussive Runes support and a really high stun buildup. Together, I rarely need more than one hit to kill normal or magic mobs and rare mobs are killed in 2-3 hits. I'm hitting so fast with mace strike that most rares are dead in less than a second. The build got good clear and is super fun. For bossing, I add fist of the gods (HoTG but with a fist) and most bosses are dead after one fist.

To understand why Ritualist works so nicely, we need to understand the strengths and limitations of Facebreaker.

Strengths:

1. It's cool and fun.

2. Strength scales both offense (more attack damage) and defense (life and armour).

Limitations:

1. You lose 3 slots.

2. The base damage is really low.

3. Due to (1) resistances are hard to cap.

Ritualist actually solves all of this. The 3 empowered rings provide most of the resistances needed, as well as a lot of flat physical damage and strength. My first idea was adding a lot of flat elemental damage by the rings but I decided to go all in on physical damage as damage is not really a problem with this build as well as I didn't want to harm my tankiness. Btw, I added 40% quality (the new breach essense) for all my rings and used physical catalyst which is super cheap. This increased both my flat physical damage and the leech mod.

And this is the second reason why ritualist is really good here, life leech. Yes, I know it was "nerfed" but for this build it's actually really amazing. Vaal pact is a great way to regenerate life over time through leech and ritualist gets crazy amount of leech from rings (I have around 40% leech just from the rings) and the "Wildwood persistance" node. It's actually the first node I took. With the investment into leech, we overleech for several seconds every instance and we basically refill life instantly every time we are hit. Generally, we can only hit by one-shots (which rarely happens). This allows me to use titanrot for 30% increased strength and a lot of armour.

The last reason we choose ritualist is blood boil. While we are not really using it for its damage, the blood lose interacts really nice with herald of blood and they provide the chain explosions that you can see in the video. Since we are using mace strike to clear, the extra AOE and explosions is really helpful.

Few other skills and how I use them:

1. Wind dancer - A really important part of the build. Leech is great if you hit first. However, there are situations where you can't hit. For example, if you are frozen. Without wind dancer, you will be dead before you can hit to start leeching. With the way leech works now, you can get 40K damage with wind dancer relatively easy. So in my case, monsters hit me and proc wind dancer. The hit from wind dancer is leeching enough life to AFK while mapping in most cases. This is mandatory for this build.

2. Refutation - I use it against difficult monsters (bosses or rares). I pop it and when they hit me I get 50% more damage. It's also another nice and cheap defensive layer.

3. Bloodhound's mark - You can use whatever mark you want. I just use it for "mark for death 2" so my mace strike will break the boss's armour.

Mapping video: https://youtu.be/IdF4S57B30g

POB: https://pobb.in/Yb_0sLYmG91W