Dominating Blow Champion

Obligatory Maze of the Minotaur

Suppression PoB

Pre-suppression PoB, slightly more damage

Note: these are configured similarly to Ghazzy's Dominating Blow Necro PoB for the sake of comparison, i.e., everything ticked on except for Vaal Haste. Adjust it as you see fit.

Forum post

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###Overview:

##Why Champion?

While it's often the case that builds get ported over to Champion to make a tanky but slightly weaker version of that build, here it's done for pure damage. The strength of War Banner and Dread Banner make physical/impale with Champion arguably the best way to scale Dominating Blow's damage.

Champion's Inspirational frees up banner reservation, grants aura effect, and gives bonus incentives for actually placing banners.

Banners? Plural?

The Perfidy body armour lets us bypass the restriction of only having a single banner, and it also grants random bonuses to banner skills.

War Banner, for example, besides completely solving minion accuracy and increasing the physical damage enemies take, grants 2.5 seconds of adrenaline to us and our minions when placed at maximum stages. Perfidy can triple this duration, up to 7.5 seconds. Our skill effect duration and, optionally, the otherwise underused reservation mastery "Non-curse aura skills have 50% increased duration" can bring this to almost 11 full seconds of adrenaline for our entire army.

Divergent Dread Banner gives our minions a massive chunk of impale chance which is another huge damage scaler. It also reduces enemies' accuracy, letting us easily reach 95% evasion cap.

And then there's Bannerman.

Why Dominating Blow?

While this build might serve as a reasonable template for other physical damage minions like Skeleton Warriors, Carrion Golems, or Zombies, there are a few hurdles to overcome.

War Banner only generates stages when you kill an enemy, which is a pretty rare occurrence in a minion build. Dread Banner only gains stages when you impale an enemy. Perfidy, among its numerous aforementioned benefits to the build, lets us generate stages for both banners on melee hit. As a strike skill, Dominating Blow satisfies these constraints, giving us banner stage generation even on bosses.

The fact that we're always attacking (and never missing) lets us solve another issue arising from our use of a unique weapon. Other minion builds often automate the casting of Desecrate and an Offering by crafting trigger on their weapon, which is of course not possible on Maata's Teaching.

We could use Arcanist Brand, but Dominating Blow gives us the ability to completely automate offerings through Battlemage's Cry on left-click with the keystone Call to Arms. The spells are triggered by attacks exerted by Battlemage's Cry, and the warcry's AoE taunt also synergizes with Champion's Conqueror and Worthy Foe ascendancy nodes. Also, unlike the trigger craft or things like Mark on Hit Support and CWDT, Battlemage's Cry doesn't come with a mana cost multiplier.

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Pros:

• Free wings MTX
• Most participatory-feeling minion build
• Vaal Domination carrying Soul Eater through a whole map
• Reliable league-starter that can fill out the atlas with cheap uniques
• Many incremental upgrades that give a distinct feeling of progression
• High top-end damage at somewhat cheap off-meta prices

Cons:

• Melee
• Vaal Domination carrying Lightning Storm through a whole map
• Mechanically disadvantaged for many boss fights, invitations, or Sanctum where you need to ramp up minions
• Champion's distance to minion nodes makes it more awkward to league-start than other ascendancies
• Button-intensive on bosses
• Stifling amounts of socket pressure
• Noisy hideout

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FAQ:

Why don't you use Multistrike?

Repeated attacks cannot be exerted. That means that using Multistrike to support Dominating Blow will break our Battlemage's Cry setup for automating our Offering. Feel free to swap that around to Arcanist Brand if you have an Awakened Multistrike, for example.

Is placing banners as bad as placing ancestral totems?

In the sense that a lot of your potential damage is tied up in doing so, yes. On the other hand, placing banners is instant, they are untargetable, and last half of eternity. Because of the stages, it's slightly less forgiving to recast them, but Champion's Inspirational does give you back 40% of the stages when you reserve your banners again. Lastly, you typically have enough of a damage surplus to mow through Guardians or defeat Pinnacle bosses without placing your banners if you don't want to (or forget...).

Is there any way to make invitations or bossing slightly less painful?

This is unfortunately the major mechanical weakness of the build. One option to consider is socketing Summon Skeletons alongside Dominating Blow to have a dual 5-link. This might help bridge the gap of starting with no damage-dealing minions while you ramp up your sentinel count.