https://youtu.be/bxkb8VHrPO8

PoB with Leveling Trees, Notes, Gem Acquisition, and Actual Gear/Tree at End of Run: https://pobb.in/0ffjoFyfXOQ2

Hey everyone, I'm Balaar and I do a lot of campaign speed leveling/running and layout guides. I wanted to share a video and PoB of me doing an RF + Fire Trap Inquisitor A10 All Skill Points and Story Lab run as we are about to hit that juicy league start time. The PoB pertains exclusively to campaign speed leveling. If you want to take RF + Fire Trap into maps, there are a ton of incredible creators with fantastic guides such as Pohx and CaptainLance who have materials you should check out.

One of the notable things about this run is that I swap to RF at level 21. This is possible thanks to the new fire mastery giving life regen per uncapped fire resistance. Using that mastery, a lot of fire resist gear, fire resist crafts, and vitality, RF can be used way earlier than it use to be. The problem before the mastery was that any solution to get RF going early in a fresh start scenario was super wonky and required a lot of deviation from how you would ideally want your tree to path in maps. As a result, you would wait until late A7 essentially to swap to RF, which at that point, you're not really doing an RF speed level of campaign or so it felt to me.

One thing to note is that this video is NOT a commentary run. I plan to do those in the future for speed leveling campaign, but I did not have time to do so this league due to IRL circumstances. There are a good amount of notes/trees on various points and some discussion in the description of YT link. There will also be some additional questions and answers in this post. Another thing to note is that this is not precisely a campaign speedrun as if it were a true speedrun, I would probably be finishing like level 52 or something instead of 60 with a lot less HP aka a lot more of a monkaSTEER run. Thus, I term this more as a speed level as I try to hit certain thresholds and be similar to what I would do on an actual league start run. The only difference between this and what I would do on league start is I might do like 3 additional Chamber of Innocence runs and 3 additional BA resets to hit 63 or so before maps.

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Some Provided Questions And Answers (In Addition To Those in YT Description)

Why do you use Alira? Essentially, Alira does two things. One the extra res makes it a lot easier to solve resistances as it gives small boost to other resists giving us ability to free up suffixies/crafts for fire res to help our flat sustain via fire mastery. Second, mana sustain for single target can be quite difficult with fire trap as traps, in general, can be a mana hog. The typical solution in maps is to use Lifetap. The problem with lifetap early in campaign especially with RF is that you will not be able to have sufficient comfort managing your degen with the additional pressure of lifetap. Lifetap becomes sustainable without much issue late in campaign around A9 or so, but until then having the extra mana regen makes a huge difference in quality of life in terms of mana sustain. You can absolutely use Kill All instead, it just makes sustaining both life and mana a little more annoying early AND it makes gearing slightly harder. On the plus side, it opens you up to get 2% max res via masteries later on tree that I do not pickup in run as I wanted the skill point allocation to be as broadly applicable as possible (aura mastery for having both life reserv and mana reserv; and armour mastery for having armour on boots, chest, gloves, helm)

Why do you get combat stamina and arsonist? So most map RF builds do not necessarily use these nodes and thats perfectly fine as they are outshined by other stuff later. However, for purposes of a speed level, these clusters of nodes solve a lot of issues that early RF has. Additionally, attributes early on are a huge issue for RF inquisitor. To make damage, sustain, life and defense make sense and feel comfortable, you want to get explosive impact and the fire mastery early to be able to swap to RF. At that point, however, you will start to struggle with str requirements. Going towards combat stamina helps solve this issue as you get to the str a lot faster than other options. Additionally, combat stamina gives us some life regen, some life % and some armour all of which is great. From there we take arsonist to be able to get some more life regen and importantly to get the 100% hit damage against ignited enemies for our single target skill. Really them, what this pathing allows us is to solve a bunch of problems and to do it in a point efficient manner that allows our damage and sustain to be adequate.

A more traditional pathing (ie non-speed leveling setup) has you not get Explosive Impact and instead go towards Devotion, Divine Judgment and then down to Hearty and Barbarism. I found this to be a bit lacking in terms of damage efficiency and sustain for as early as I wanted to swap as the point density to do this pathing means you get less power spikes then how I path. On the other hand, hearty is an uber strong node and we do pick it up eventually, but because we do not get it until later our sustain is a little more challenging than it would be with the hearty pathing.

In the end though, one thing to note is that the combat stamina pathing and surging vitality are all calculated such that you can use the respec points you get from this run (12 by default, 4 more with super minimal time investment) to change the tree to path more towards the super juicy marauder life/resistance/aura nodes.

Why is your % life on tree so low? So in this run, I end up around 80% life on tree, which is about 20 to 40% lower than I typically do for most other speed leveling builds (100 to 120 or so). The reason for is that having too much % life on tree can cause issues for sustain on RF as your % increase will outpace what you can get from flat life regen meaning you will start degening more as your HP increase and thus degen increases more than your flat life regen sources can handle.

Surging vitality, HUH? So surging vitality is nice intermediate node for leveling. I wouldn't necessarily use it in end game, but the burst sustain and the consistent sustain from small nodes comes in a very convenient place for point efficiency while speed leveling. Also the burst healing is fantastic at the point at which you get as you will be in early A6ish where mobs/bosses, for some reason, are on the juice compared to how they scaled in first half of campaign. Thus in short, its a convenient node with decent point efficiency, respec out of it later.

Where are you getting max res? Max res is essentially coming from Barbarism (+1%) and Purity of Fire (up to +3% in campaign). Additionally, you can pick up two masteries, the aura mastery and the armour mastery if your sockets/gear allow for it, giving you an additional 2% max res. In PoB, I did not take these to ensure that if you did not have sockets to allow for life reservation or did not have armour on relevant pieces to enable armour mastery that you would still be able to sustain RF appropriately.

Happy to answer other questions as they come up.