POB https://pastebin.com/2sMT70QB - Lvl 94 CwCwDripAF on ninja

Chieftain is currently tied for last with Glad at 0.6%. This is unacceptable.

Bear with me, this build started as a meme but is now shredding t16 content so I'll try to explain what's going on

Here is my StunCaster league start Chieftain. He started as Vaal Firestorm, but after snagging a good bloodnotch before they became inaccessible, I moved to pure VD/Flame Surge stuncasting.

POB above is for my current form of build. Stormshroud jewel was a recent QoL addition but in no way needed. Prior to that, the protection mastery can give solid budget ailment immunity by only allowing you to have one dmg/non-dmg ailment applied at once. Bloodnotch should be at least around 50% to feel good since we use the Stun Mastery for an additional 10% restored on stunning hits, but I haven't tested the low-end cause I got my 59% and I have to avoid looking at their price or I might sell it :)

Defenses

We stack armor, we use eternal blessing determination, vitality and PB (to get lowlife dmg) for auras. We use a very strong 4 resistance and granite flask setup with all Flagellent mods so you gain 3 charges on hit. They also are used at full and during most fights are constantly re-filled.Defense are through several recover mechanics. Chieftain has Jugg levels of regen whenever they have taken fire dmg which is always. My regen bounces between 1200-4500 through most fights. We are also getting the direct recovery on stun mechanics from new masteries and bloodnotch. We crafted a shaper unset ring because sockets are necessary and put 12 spell gain on hit there. Mind you, that's 12 gain per hit, not spell. VD is an aoe and hits twice with the corpse explosion and the ball detonation.

We use a Daresso shield to be effectively block capped the majority of the time since we gain the +30% spell block on low life. Usually with a hit of two we are attack/spell blocked cap for the rest of the fight. We are cooking a Daresso with life gain on block as well, but that not in yet.

With our flasks setup, we eat shaper slams, we can tank guardians and conquerors for the most part, though we do have to avoid big degens like Baran square and shaper beam (oh and the one time I accidently added 250% added dmg to a blasphemer's grip possessed Minotaur....)

​

Stun Tech

Two ways to do this - I use Valyrun ring because I got a great double corrupt one for bleed/poison immune. The alternative to ensure all hits on us are stunning is to use the ES mastery. This would take 4 points though and I'd rather fit in chaos resistance with the cluster I crafted.Valyrun makes your stun threshold based on ES, so much current stun threshold is a hit of like 110dmg.

​

Damage

Fine-tuning the ideal dps on this is a fun challenge since often another spell gem is more DPS than a support gem. In our essence crafted helm we use 2x flame surges and our chest procs 2x VD gems. Each spell in the CwS loop gets to roll for each spell individually so two also means we almost never don't do at least some dmg on hit if we hit the 9% chance to fail on CwS.

We have very little damage on the tree. We get alot from hitting ignited enemies (fire mastery), 2x dmg curses and the big two, Adrenaline after recently stunned and 25% more spell dmg after stunned while casting. We can trigger these whenever we want by casting near a mob, so I like to tap a Divergent purifying flame for consecrated ground (50% curse reduced effect + 5% regen) and gain the buff from divergent PF so mobs take 5% increased damage on the consecrated ground.

We get scorch often enough from anomalous flame surge.

We also have shock (15% for 4sec) and chance for double dmg on focus.

We get 40%+ when leeching from gloves and have +gem weapon and ammy on items

We use immortal call + the endurance on hit armour node on tree to constantly proc our 15% more dmg from ascendency as well as provide protection through endurance stacks or IC

We use RF and low life Pain Attunement for additional more multipliers, sine we don't have support gems, these are super valuable.We use punishment instead of elemental weakness because punishment gives debilitate on hit, which is like a mini enfeeble. We need to tank to do dmg100% shrine effect with Atlas passives for mapping. Nothing gives more dopamine than getting an acceleration shrine.

​

Wtf is that ChestBlunderbore is the shit. But you can swap for a rare influence chest or Skin of the Lords w/ Pain Attunment and it would be strictly better. However:

1. Skin of the lords with that is like...15div minimum lol

Blunderbore is the shit. No one uses it, it gives Gull level shrine effect, which we scale further through Atlas shrine passives. It give 2 PERMANENT buff effects:

--Lesser Brutal Shrine- 20% increased Damage- 20% increased Stun Duration on Enemies- Knocks Enemies Back on Hit

--Lesser Massive Shrine- 10% increased Character Size- 20% increased Area of Effect- 20% increased maximum Life

What so good about this is the 20% increased maximum life can be freely used with the 15% more life on the life mastery wheel since it doesn't count as your chest having life.

The knockback on hit is....maybe a DPS loss, but is fun and can let you cheese some mobs. Also who doesn't want to see 60 VD balls push an essence mob across a map :)

Downside is that I'm basically forced into running the Supreme Ostentation node from the timeless jewel. However that thing is underrated as hell for league starting. Imagine having no attribute requirements when gearing for a starter.

Gearing

Just life, life recovery and fire dmg.

Stun recovery is already enough from tree and shield. Any more stun recovery and it makes our adrenaline never hit the 4 sec proc and only last 2 seconds per proc. This is why we DO NOT use immutable jewel that everyone else is pairing. Tested it and it basically kills adrenaline proc.

​

Clearing

Generally very strong and scale with mod density, attack speed and movespeed, so does best against things like expedition, deli and essence mobs because they spit projectiles at you which proc our spells to the cast limit usually.

This build lets you do things like scale your DPS with map mods such as increased monster attack and movespeed, added projectiles or other buffs to movespeed as we hit the VD ball cap of 60 much faster when we are getting hit quickly. Likewise, evasion on your character or chilling enemies (such as on block with shield trees) is a dps loss.

​

Bossing

Varies -

Shaper without Maven doesn't hit you very often so it can be hard to proc enough before the degens make the arena dicey. I'm going to play with adding Maven and praying she uses her attack boons instead of vitality boon.

Gonna be testing the synth stuff this week, only one down so far, but twisted fight was simple.

Eater is no trouble whatsoever, just avoid big degen during the clear, but you use the tentacle slams to proc VD.

Exarch ball phase is hilariously ez on this build, I just run into them or ice wall myself in the middle for fun. Annihilation still one-shots us. His projectile attack is our dps phase.

Maven arenas are easier than solo bosses. No feared yet

​

Why cast on stun?

Cast when Stun got an insane buff to both its chance to proc and the cooldown rate of procs. It now is 91% chance to cast at FULL damage at 20/20 gem (93% with perfect qual/21 gem). It now also has a 0.1sec trigger cooldown vs 0.250 sec. Theoretically when getting hit by 20+ mobs, we can reach the max proc rate and spit out 9/10 spells/sec for each spell slotted.

We use phantasmal desecrate and VD on divergent cascade gems with varying quality. Divergent cascade basically stutters the +2 cascade casts the gems performs, so now you ensure your VDs are not competing for the same corpse pile.

We use phantasmal desecrate to have a chance to spawn super high HP corpses at 20% chance, which is a huge boost to the corpse explosion dmg portion of VD.

We do use PB to get lowlife and survivability when going against density, but can turn off for heavy degen arenas and just lose the 30% more pain attunement.

Thanks for Reading!