Shockingly Viable Herald of Thunder League Start | Path of Exile 3.22 | Auto-Bomber League Starter

ONCE YOU HAVE POISONOUS CONCOCTION, BE SURE TO UPDATE YOUR LIFE FLASKS REGULARLY. THE BETTER YOUR FLASK TYPE THE BETTER YOUR DAMAGE (Not Magic or Rare, but type like small, medium, large, greater, grand. giant, stc) Q&A At the end for Expected questions Note : The Gear in all of the Acts are just examples from a practice run I did. They dont need to be exact. Note 2 : The Gear and Trees for Red Maps and Beyond are Examples. Make the build your own. Want more suppress, get it, dont need defense? Get more Damage. This build is my taste. I dont mind a long fight if I am a little more beefy. TLDR : Guides are not rules, do what you want, experiment, learn, grow. Prioritize Getting and Keeping your elemental resistances to 75% ACT 1 During Act 1 Keep an eye out for a good shield and an item (not a weapon) with linked Sockets G-G-G this is because we will switch to Poisonous Concoction just before Merveil. BEFORE fighting Merveil, cap (or get close) your cold Resistance. Getting two saphire rings helps a lot, just sell an iron ring and a blue skill gem to a vendor at the same time to get one You can also use your crafting bench to add resistances, even to white gear When You Switch to Poisonous Concoction make sure to upgrade your life flasks to "Greater Life Flasks" if you have not already found some. Nessa Sells these for 3 Wisdom Scrolls, If you are short make sure you sell the Blacksmith whetstones and armour scrap you have Also Pick up Vitality if you can. these are not hard requirements, but poisonous concoction gets better the better your life flasks are. Having Vitality can help keep you from needing them Pick up Withering Step At some point. this helps with damage on Bosses. Dont add it to left click yet, as it shares a cooldown with your dash. ACT 2 Kill All the Bandits. When offered Herald Skills as a quest reward, get Herald of Agony, wait and buy Herald of Thunder later. Herald of Thunder will stay inactive for a while, but we still want to level it. ACT 3 Get Grace As a Quest reward and level it up. It can stay inactive. Grabbing a weapon or shield for a weapon swap set is a good way to level gems if you dont have the right colors on your gear. Once all the Labrynth Trials are complete go ascend. If you have been upgrading your gear as you have been leveling you should not have an issue. Ground loot is usually enough, but dont forget about the crafting bench. If you get a 4 link Green (G-G-G-G) at any point, add Change to poison support to your Poison Concoction ACT 4 In Act 4 start identifying all mana flasks you find looking for an "Enduring" Flask. This Mana flask does not stop running when your mana is full, so it runs the entire duration. This is important as it is an easy way to keep a flask active for the ascendency we picked up in act 3 For one of the Quests for Dialla, you are offered a Greater Multiple Projectiles Support. Take it and replace the Lesser Multiple Projectiles on Poison concoction. ACT 5 From here on keep in mind the gear in the example is not good. You should be aiming for better AND using the crafting bench to round out resistances. No Specific notes here. Keep an eye out for a four or five link. Again if you get a 4 link for Poisonous Concoction, add Chance to poison ACT 6 Once you complete the first quest for Lilly grab as many of the new skills as you can. Level them where you can, Once you get the Passive Presage we can make Grace Or Purity of Elements Active and drop Vitality (Always Use Purity of Elements over Grace if your Resistances are not capped). We will be getting Charisma next, so if its uncomfortable to have grace/Purity of Elements on, wait 4 levels. Focus on improving your Gear while going through the next few acts. Evasion/ES Gear with life/resists is ideal, bonus points for 4 Linked items ACT 7 Get your second ascendency here. ACT 8/Act9 Again Keep checking Evasion ES Gear and Replace with better options as you can. Linked Sockets, Life, Resists are the priorities. If you have a chest that does not have Life on it, pick up the 15% life mastery. ACT 10 In Act 10 we need to farm for good gear. We need okay evasion/es gear, Elemental resistances as close to 105% Each (this is to account for the 30% drop from killing kitava), and as much life as you can get. 2 Four links is all you need to get going in maps. Try to avoid relying on Rings for Resistance as we plan on replacing them with Uniques Shortly. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Heist Pause for Gear At this point a good strategy is to go do some heisting for gear and currency. This will help fill out gear for the switch and map transition. Look for the magic flasks we want and need. We need a Topaz Flask, and want a Stibinite and a Jade. Pick up Rune Daggers while you are doing this. Look for Gem levels for Herald of Thunder, Damage over time multi, increased poison damage. Also While you are at this point look in Trade for a Corrupted blood immunity jewel. Any will do for now. My test run of Heist gave me 11 chaos total and a bunch of other currency. Use this to get the uniques where you can. Any gear that is lackluster see if you can do some light crafting with the essences you have picked up The Suffix on my Amulet is a Jun unveil. If you dont its not a big deal, add it when you can. (if you want you can probably grind this out in Once you are happy with your Gear, Continue Act 10 until You can get the Third ascendency, then go get that. Before switching to Herald make sure to use some alterations on your topaz flask and get Charge Recovery, Duration, or Reduce Charge per use. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Herald of Thunder Switch In Act10 we can switch to Herald AFTER our third acendency. In order to do that you MUST have these two Uniques at a minimum. Volkuur's Guidance (Lightning Varient : has mod "Your Lightning Damage can Poison") Storm Secret (any works for now, but later you will want over 45% on this mod : "Herald of Thunder's Storms Hit Enemies with (30-50)% increased Frequency") Ignore the Corrupt on the Storm Secr I have. Its just what I got for the test. An uncorrupted is better early since the lightning resistance is good These two Uniques are recommended, but not needed. They are pretty common, and help quality of life a bit, but make sure Resistances are good first. ONLY USE THIS SHIELD IF YOUR RESISTANCES ARE 105% WITHOUT A SHIELD. Leper's Alms (Increased Duration of ailments here helps us a lot. Also good Evasion and ES. A Rare Shield will be better later.) Mark of Submission (Socket Temporal Chains. We can manually cast this if you dont have/cant get the ring, and later we will want Temp Chains on Hit as a Corruption on Gloves.) Once you make the Swap to Herald Run Blood Aqueducts in Act 9 a couple times to get a feel for it and to level up any new gems you bought a bit. Make sure to keep your Topaz flask up. Also feel free at this point to add another reservation like arctic armor, tempest Shield, or Dread Banner. If the mana is a bit tight, consider grabbing the reservation eficiency node on the "Influence" wheel, under our curse wheel. If The Blood Aqueducts testing felt bad check the following 1. Make sure you have a Topaz Flask 2. Make sure you have Steel Skin on Cast When damage taken 3. Make sure you have Both "Ghost Dance" and the Evasion/ES Mastery allocated. 4. Make sure you have plenty of Evasion and Energy Shield (At this point I have 9k Evasion in Hideout and 500 ES, you can do with less, but this amount feels pretty good.) 5. MAKE SUPER SURE YOU HAVE LIGHTNING RES CAPPED. If all these are true you should be feeling pretty good. Your ES will likely be bouncing between 0 and half, but that will improve as we get more Evasion and ES. If your life starts to fall use your flask or enduring cry. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: As soon as you can, Get a Writhing Jar Hybrid Flask for fighting bosses. Until you have it just use ball lightning for those fights. The issue here is that for Herald of thunder to start working we need to shock something. Bosses are much harder to shock due to haveing much larger HP pools. Writhing jar helps us solve this. Just keep it with you and switch it with your life flask for bosses, or just keep it in that spot. Just be sure Enduring cry is somewhere where you can use it quickly in place of a flask if Writhing is down. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Moving into Maps Take things slow. The Red map Goals tree and Gear are things to work toward while you work through maps. Focus on Evasion/ES, Life, and Resistances on most gear. Damage will be coming from Weapon, Cluster Jewels, and Annoints. If you cannot get the plus level fractures right away dont sweat it. this just makes crafting easier since you can just focus on Attributes and defenses on gear. Getting the Temp Chains on hit Corrupt on gloves will be Great since that frees up the ring slot we are using for it. I prefer replacing it with a rare ring, but if you want more damage, you can get a second storm secret. Much of the example gear I have neglects Spell supression. Dont do that. Spell Supression is great. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q&A Q) My Herald of Thunder is not going off on a boss HALP A) You have to shock something to get Herald of thunder to start working. Because the Build is poison, our hits are pretty tiny. This means that for large targets we often dont hit the ailment threshold. Writhing Jar is what fixes this. Use Writhing Jar then use Storm Brand to get Herald Going Q) My Herald is going off, but I feel like I do no damage. A) Make sure your chance to poison is 100%. In later skill sets we remove chance to poison support, and that is made up for by Divergent Herald of Agony. This is even more important if We replace both Volkuurs and Chance to Poison support. Q) Why Ball Lightning / Why did we stop using Ball Lightning? A) When we switch to Herald of Thunder we want a second 4 link for help clearing and bossing. The better our damage gets, the less we need a second skill. You can still use one, but you dont need it. Storm Burst is another good alternative, but I Did not use it as it is a channeling skill, and would make people stand still for too long in my head. Q) I am figting [Any number > 1] Boss at a time and it sucks! HALP A) Some of this is just going to suck, some of it can be helped with positioning. HoT Strikes in a circle arround you and it prioritizes targets based on how much they have been hit by HoT. So in an oversimplification, if you are fighting two bosses your damage is halved, but if you can possition yourself in such a way that only one of the targets is in range, then your full damage potential is on one target.