Over 1M DPS Spectral Shield Throw on a Budget

I'm tired of seeing build guides for Spectral Shield Throw that pad their damage with unreliable buffs or mirror-worthy gear. Here is a Spectral Shield Throw build that gets over 1 million damage with really cheap gear. While reaching that benchmark, it does not use:

• Awakened gems

• Corrupted gems or gear

• Cluster jewels

• Watcher's Eyes

• Anoints, catalysts, or enchants

• Charges unsustainable for boss fights

• Rage/Rampage

• Shocks

You can add these things to the build once you're willing to start investing in it to really push your damage, but too many builds make extraordinary claims while glossing over expensive requirements or fudging the PoB numbers. This build does not. This is not meant to be a full build guide for someone unfamiliar with SST, but a blueprint for a different (I would say more powerful) way of building SST.

Here's the build: https://pastebin.com/HRRs6p2D.

So how does it work? In a nutshell, the build uses Impale while stacking strength to gain damage bonuses from Iron Grip and Iron Will with Repentance and the new Crown of Eyes, which also get increased by Iron Fortress. Originally the idea was to triple dip on damage with a Doon Cuebiyari, but a three green socketed Prismatic Eclipse outperforms it. Most of these are really cheap uniques; even a six linked Iron Heart is around 30 chaos in Delirium, and the prophecy to make it an Iron Fortress is around 3 chaos and easy enough to do. The build's strength comes from Split Personality jewels. Strength+Life is the best one for this build and runs around 20 chaos each, but strength and armor, accuracy, or evasion are even cheaper and will do if necessary.

Oh, and that million dps number is with a 2383 armor shield (which you can reasonably buy or craft for less than a exalt, but a SST build will obviously have better DPS with better, more expensive shields), 6k+ life, 61% block chance, and no rings or boots! That's right, builds that use all the gear lots are unethical; don't be a slave to the meta.

Joking aside, getting resists is a challenge for this build, and boots+rings are the easiest ways to get them. You can also eke out even more damage from those gear slots (boots can get %strength), and they are good places to invest in once you're no longer on a budget. You can also get a much better amulet than an Astramentis for stacking strength. (Note that one of the Split Personalities in the PoB is Strength/Int, which is more expensive due to the meta Int-stacking builds. Preferably it should be replaced with Strength+Life once you have enough Int from another source to use Repentance gloves.) However, even if you use an Aurumvorax for resists, you still have over 800,000 dps.

This build is not a league starter. It's a pain to level and can require a lot of regrets. When using Split Personality, you want to slot them in as far away from your start as possible, so I recommend speccing out of early jewel sockets in order to move the Split Personalities into farther away sockets as soon as you can. The easiest way to make this is to respec an existing character. This build could also be emulated as a Berserker with blitz charges and Rage for really great attack and movement speed, but the tree would be significantly different.