I've been trying to cook a Consecrated Path or Doryani's Touch build for ages now, but I've so far been unsuccessful; unfortunately, I still don't have a strong build, but with the new ignite tech out there (and my relative unfamiliarity with making Ignite builds), I figured I could throw out what I have and maybe others can pick it up and make it workable.

I'll start with the ignite tech and move on to the PoB.

###

So we have three support gems that work well together: Controlled Blaze Support, Sadism Support, and Swift Affliction Support. We've already seen some work on Controlled Blaze Support—ideally, for scaling our ignites on a single target, we want around 13 ignites Recently.

Bookmark that number. Going back to Sadism Support, if we take the base duration of Ignite (4s), this brings it down to 0.8s. Adding in Swift Affliction Support, it brings us down further to 0.6s. If we then get another 21% faster ignite from jewels, for example, then we are doing damage 100% faster, which gets us down to 0.3s ignites.

How often do we need to ignite to keep full ignite uptime on the enemy? 4 seconds/0.3 seconds = 13.333. So if we go for 13 attacks every 4 seconds, we get the benefit of both: against a single target, we maximize our Controlled Blaze Support while also maximizing the number of ignites on an enemy.

How much damage does this do? For our 100% faster ailments tech, if we fill the uptime, it'll be 100% more damage—to show this, suppose that our original ignite damage is X. Then we do X(0.2)(0.75) = 0.15X damage per ignite (over 0.6 seconds). With 100% faster ailments, we can fit 13 ignites into a 4 second window. 0.15X(13) = 1.95X. So we get 95% more damage from those.

Then we take into account the 39% more Damage modifier from Swift Affliction, giving us 2.71x damage. This is an average of 64.9% more damage mods on two skill gems—pretty good value so far. Then, for single target (which is where we would need more damage the most—clearing trash mobs is rarely a problem with Slam builds), we add in Controlled Blaze, which nets us another 72% more damage, since we're precisely at 13 ignites over 4 seconds. So we have a very impressive 4.66x more damage (or 366% more damage) with 3 support gems for single target damage on ignite builds that can manage 13 attacks over 4 seconds (3.25 <= x < 3.5 attacks per second). For non-single target, it would be closer to 2.71x for 2 support gems—we could swap out Controlled Blaze for something else for multiple targets.

###

Now, onto Consecrated Path and Doryani's Touch. I'll be the first to admit that most of my experience is with absurd things like permanently sustaining Indigon—I really haven't worked with ignites or damage over time in general besides ticking Righteous Fire for the "More Spell Damage" modifier. So I'm hoping some DoT experts can help improve the build to something actually worth the investment and not just a meme build.

For Doryani's Touch: I couldn't really get anything to work.

For Consecrated Path: I could scale some damage, but I'm hitting a wall. I tried a Chieftain build, which was bad; turns out the damage increase from that ascendency, even for Slams, is abysmal, and damage is what we need. So I respecc'd to Berserker with a Juggernaut Forbidden Flame/Flesh node for defense (the "8% of Armour applies to elemental damage" one, so we just stack lots of Armour for defenses w/ some Block and Life) and we are able to stack our needed attack speed (3.30 atk/sec in this case) just from Rage. Meaning there's a ramp-up time; if it's too long, we can try to accelerate it via other means.

That being said, even after a lot of investment, a pretty insane weapon, strong gear—we barely breach a million DPS. There are some nice "when stationary" techs that we can take advantage of for added offense/defense, and we can use stuff like Bronn's Lithe since Consecrated Path is a movement skill—but I just don't know how else to scale this. (Probably because 99% of my 'scaling damage' attempts are trying to force mana stacking sustained Indigon, which never ends well.)

PoB: https://pobb.in/OjX7wmuUgczb

Any thoughts are appreciated, or even a full re-work, as I'm well aware the PoB is bad. I'm not an expert in making strong builds, truth be told; I'd only consider myself an expert in sustained Indigon tech and little else. I'm just hoping we can somehow finally make Consecrated Path and/or Doryani's Touch a strong DPS skill with any of the new league changes. So far, though, even with all the melee ignite tech released, I'm not seeing any viability besides as a meme skill. Otherwise, I'll have to fall back to my jank Atziri's Rule/Choir of the Storm triggerbots build (which is also cool, but I'd really like to make this Slam ignite gameplay work).