An unnecessarily expensive build. (Strength Stack Chaos Molten Strike)

Hello my friends; today I bring you my sort of end-league build (for me at least, there's still much time to play): a Replica Alberon's Strength Stacking Molten Strike Juggernaut. I will be explaining some basic concepts here for people that haven't ran a Strength stack build before, so bear with me if you already know how some of these mechanics work.

I had previously played a poison Molten Strike pathfinder early on in the league and was fascinated with the Vengeant Cascade interaction that surely doesn't survive next league (at least in its current form), and set out to improve on the concept with a heaping mound of currency that I had acquired through both farming and some extremely lucky card gambling. I had about 800 divines to work with, but only ended up spending about 640, including a Mageblood.

What makes this build tick: As with any Strength stack build, the idea is to uhhh, stack strength. My ascendancy of choice ended up being Juggernaut as Marauder has the best access to hefty amounts of strength on the pathing, gains accuracy rating based on strength (Undeniable grants 500 flat accuracy, and double your strength in accuracy), which then gets turned into attack speed from the same Undeniable node, and also makes amazing leverage of the Warlord helmet mod "Gain Accuracy rating equal to your strength". In essence we gain 3x our strength in Accuracy, and 1% attack speed per 150 accuracy rating. I ended up with 16,340 accuracy without even purposefully stacking any accuracy outside of a mod on 2 Split Personality jewels, which results in 108% increased attack speed.

Juggenaut is also a great defensive class with free Endurance charge generation, and most importantly the Unbreakable node for 8% of armour applying to elemenetal damage with hits. With 92k armour this resulted in about an 84% reduction in elemental hit damage taken (from Pinnacle boss hits) just from armour, which stacks with resistance and other sources of elemental damage reduction.

Most important of all though is that it's a Marauder, so we can levy the power of War Bringer forbidden jewels for instant 50 rage generation for Berserk. Using the unique shield Redblade Banner grants us 50% increased Warcry Cooldown recovery speed, allowing for 100% uptime on our chosen Warcry, and also infinite Warcry power, which becomes rather important.

We of course use the classic tech of Battlemage's Cry + Iron Fortress + Iron Will. At max warcry power Battlemage's Cry turns 150% of spell damage into attack damage for a duration, of which we have 100% uptime on due to its duration lasting longer than its cooldown. This is further compounded by using Iron Fortess for 3% melee physical damage per 10 strength rather than 2%, which is converted through the Iron Will keystone to also apply to spell damage. Effectively rather than gaining 2% melee phys per 10 strength, we gain 3% melee phys, converted to also apply to spell damage, which is then converted to attack damage at a 150% value via Battlemage's Cry.

In essence rather than 2% melee melee physical damage per 10 strength, we get 4.5% generic attack damage per 10 strength, which scales the massive amounts of flat chaos damage from Replica Alberon's Warpath.

Replica Alberon's has some distinct advantages over Brutus' Lead Sprinkler in that the damage can't be reflected, enemies generally have lower chaos resistance than elemental resistances, you get to leverage the massive power of wither, and you can effectively use any attack you wish as a damage applicator rather than just attacks able to be used with Sceptres, which can be very restricted. Wand-attacks are even rather common with Replica Alberon's, but the insane combo of Molten Strike + Vengeant Cascade right now just generally blows most other options out of the water to be honest.

As of current, my damage is sitting at around 416M Pinnacle DPS, and with a build eHP of about 435k. My eHP is rather contingent on Molten Shell and Berserk being up, which with how the rage sacrifice of War Bringer works, is inconsistent at best. With neither up I sit at a more modest 188k eHP, which is very solid, but not really in the 'giga-tank' territory. I can and do die against certain Uber Boss mechanics like Uber Shaper's "Ultimate Chaos" ball spam phase, but as a generality Uber Bossing is a complete breeze with this much DPS. I previously had around 750M DPS, but decided that it was pretty overkill for 95% of situations and built for more defense.

Current PoB: https://pobb.in/lzym2PY6bYBJ

Small playlist of the build in action, all of which were recorded at only level 92 with less defenses and DPS than the final level 100 version: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyGgu57heH5ugrSKGUI9vuBBmbkl8OOfx

If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to give a solid answer.