PoE 3.18 (Dead in 3.20) – Self-Chill Poison Lightning Strike Pathfinder

You want to blast through red maps and speed farm with your Sentinels without dying too often? LS Poison is perfectly suited for this purpose as it has a super satisfying playstyle due to Master Toxicist and comes with a rock-solid defenses. If you like this build and are interested in PoE Tips, solid builds and step-by-step guides consider subscribing to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/PoEAcademy If you have any questions, go ahead and ask them on my discord (https://discord.gg/mM7ZrVZrag) in the corresponding build channel. I will try to add these to the FAQ section, too. --------------------------- Gear --------------------------- Minimum Gear Requirements 1: Self-Chill Poison There are a couple of cheap but mandatory items for this build. To make Lightning Strike apply poison on hit, you will need a Pneumatic Dagger with at least 350 elemental dps. For the self-chill setup, you will need a golden rule jewel to apply poison to yourself. You must protect yourself against the poison damage which can be done by using a watcher's eye with the "unaffected by poison while affected by malevolence" modifier. An icefang Orbit ring will make it so that you are chilled when you are poisoned and by the way also gets rid off porcupines. Last but not least there is the Winterweave Coral ring which reverses the effect of chill on you. That now might sound like a lot, but these items were very cheap at least when I bought them. Shortlist: - Pneumatic Dagger with 350 ele dps - Golden Rule Jewel - Watcher's Eye with "unaffected by poison while affected by malevolence" modifier - Icefang Orbit Ring - Winterweave Coral Ring Minimum Gear Requirements 2: Flask Setup (Self-heal) You also need a minimal setup for your defenses. As you have spotted correctly, the build does not feature any life flask but constantly heals itself. Why you may ask? Well, because of the Master Surgeon ascendancy which recovers 6% of life when you use a flask. We can automate this by rolling our flasks with charges gained on hit mod and by adding a "used when charges reach full" to each and every one of them. As long as you get hit, you get charges and when they reach the flask's charge limit, they are used and heal you. From my testings, you want to have flasks with 5 or more charges when hit by an enemy and at least 3 of them should have the used when reach full enchant. Shortlist: - Diamond / Ruby / Topaz / Granite Flasks - Prefixes: All 4 of them with 5+ charges gained on hit - Suffixes: Immune to Shock, Immune to Ignite, Reduced effect of curses on you, Immune to Bleed - Alternatively: Amour / Attack Speed (NO Immune to Freeze/Chill as it will brick the Self-Chill Setup), but I died once to Bleed because the flask was not activated Upgrades (in order of importance): - >98% Spell Suppression in total - Taste of Hate Flask - Ungils Harmony Amulet - Tribal Fury Annoint or +1 Strike implicit on Gloves (searing exarch implicit) -> I prefer the second option, as you will be able to annoint Aggressive Bastion this way for a lot of dmg and endurance charges - Blizzard Crown helmet (you want "Increased Ailment Duration on Focus" as it greatly increases your damage!) - Shield with synthesis implicit "Socketed gems have 20% increased reservation efficiency" -> allows you to run herald of agony for 10% more damage. - Cluster Jewel (make sure to get the "Veteran Defender" mod for attributes and elemental resistances) - Replica Hotheaded Jewel - Mantra of Flames Jewel - Pneumatic Dagger with at least 450 elemental dps and high base crit Endgame Upgrades (Pick whichever): - Watcher's Eye with "unaffected by poison while affected by malevolence" (remember, mandatory) + "flask charge on crit while affected by precision" - Blizzard Crown with LS enchant (although I think it is currently not worth the money) - Enlighten 4 setup to squeeze in Anger / remove Herald of Agony --------------------------- Leveling --------------------------- THIS IS NOT A LEAGUE STARTER! Level as Elemental Spectral Helix Deadeye and transition into Poison Lightning Strike when you have your minimal gear setups ready I've used this PoB https://pobb.in/afVFxfTKJ5Qm to league start 3.18 with and then transitioned into Poison LS on day 3 of the league 90% of the gear from Spectral Helix can be used in this build though so the transition is extremely smooth. --------------------------- Crafting Gear --------------------------- Crafting Gear All of my items were either cheap to buy or were self-crafted: - The spell suppression gear can be crafted quite easily with essences of doubt on evasion bases or by eldritch crafting unfinished items. If you don't know how this works, check out my step-by-step guide on the topic: https://youtu.be/wBz1I3w6d4A - The dagger can be crafted with either essence of hatred, anger or wrath whichever is cheapest. Alternatively you can use fossils (pristine + deft) -> Better potential but also more expensive - The belt can be crafted with Intelligence/Strength essences - The flasks are all self-crafted as well. Craft on any flask with an itemlevel above 80 to be able to hit up to 7 charges gained when hit by an enemy. Alteration spam it until you hit 5 or more charges gained on hit plus a decent suffix (see list above) Buying Gear Link on my discord: https://discord.gg/mM7ZrVZrag --------------------------- Misc --------------------------- Playstyle Tips - Make sure that you reactivate your flasks when there was a longer break (e.g., for looting) in between packs - Hitting twice is usually enough to wipe out packs so you can already move to the next one while Master Toxicists does its work - Video with maps and boss example: https://youtu.be/iU3TfuZs8kY FAQ - I'm not generating frenzy charges, why? -> You must quality Poacher's Mark for it to grant a chance to receive frenzy charges when you hit enemies - How do I cap my elemental resistances? Get all res on jewels and Veteran Defender on the large cluster jewel! - How do I cap my chaos resistances? When you have your self-chill setup in place you will receive 1 chaos resistance for each poison on you (see golden rule jewel) for a total of 100 chaos resistance. - Dagger + "Hits cannot be evaded"? So we can drop accuracy which makes gearing a bit easier. - Is there any visual effect to see if the poison is working? Poison is indicated by a slight green "smoke" on top of each enemy ( https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Poison?file=Poison_status_ailment_screenshot.jpg ) - Is going venom gyre/cobra lash going to be comparable? At least from the damage effectiveness it looks like venom gyre could work although I would say that you don't want to waste the insane damage effectinevess of LS - Why not assasin? Because it is less tanky and the damage is close to what pathfinder offers, except you are ready to pour in many exalts then assassin has a much higher damage ceiling.