Let me introduce you to a skill that has received a significant buff this league compared to other melee skills (top 10 most buffed). It was bugged last league and will be fixed this league, the bug was a hard cap at 1sec duration (you couldn't go below it), now it will be possible to go below it, which changes everything.

The way it works is quite different from classic earthshatter builds: here you don't have to use warcry at all to make the spikes explode, they just explode at the end of their duration. This means that the shorter they last, the faster you can attack and create a perfect loop of explosions.

According to my calculations, the hard cap for attack speed is 4.7 aps for 0.6 sec duration (which is achievable with just 21/20 less duration support), beyond 4.7 aps you attack too fast for the spikes to have time to explode, which means that the closer you get to 4.7 aps, the more your dps increases in theory. On top of all this, every time you attack, you create 6 cracks that create an exploding spike at their end, and these explosions can overlap, allowing you to triple your dps if you have three explosions hitting the target, and all this can be made even simpler by using concentrated effect support.

The idea I had with this skill was to take advantage of its hit rate to play an impale build, which has also been buffed significantly this league. And to get the most out of an impale build, you have to play champion. Since Determination was nerfed, I didn't want to invest in it at all. Instead, why not use the lucky block? With flesh & flame I can just steal the node from the gladiator and use it to my advantage on a champion.

I don't know how expensive it will be, but in my opinion it won't be expensive for several reasons: a slayer would never want to use the block as a defense mechanism, it wouldn't make sense. A gladiator would also have no interest in FF this node, knowing that the one before it is incredibly strong and that there are plenty of nodes from other ascendants (slayer in particular, which are 10x more interesting to FF for a glad), and finally, an average champion player wouldn't go for this node either, unless he had the same idea as me, but I think most will use classic defenses as determination.

So if I don't play determination, how do I manage defenses ? First, I block everything. Seriously, for physical damage, I will use 6 endurance charges + crab barrier + fortification + flesh and stone, and the physical damage that, by some incredible chance, might reach me won't do any damage at all. According to PoB, I could tank the Uber Shaper slam without any problem. For defenses against elemental damage, I cap my resistances, always use 6 endurance charges + flesh and stone and fortify, which is more than enough to mitigate any spell that would pass my 91% chance to block spell damage lol.

For dots, I am immune to bleed with Steelskin, immune to poison with the armor and evasion mastery, immune to corrupted blood with a jewel corruption, immune to ignite with a flask enchanted with "use when ignited," and immune to burning ground with the pantheon.

Why is it super important to be immune to most dot ? Because the build uses Dissolution of the Flesh, which is an incredible tool when paired with block and works really well with Petrified Blood. One of the biggest weaknesses of Dissolution of the Flesh are dots. Dissolution of the Flesh gives me a huge amount of life points that will help even more to avoid potential one-shots that would pass through the block. So, lucky block + Dissolution of the Flesh + Petrified Blood + Flesh and Stone + fortify + crab barrier + capped res = tanky.

For offense, we use impale, crit and attack speed (mostly). What's the best way to scale crit build in 3.25 ? Play staves. They got heavily buffed in crit chance and you can achieve stupid numbers like 11% crit chance on them. So staff make crit cap really easy, but that's not all, staff also provide block support, and i'm play block as defense, so it's just perfect ? Then we just use ryslathas to scale damage further, some attack speed here and there and we're done.

What's fantastic is that we can make use of a double influenced chest with minus attack cost (up to -20 with elevated mod) and it will be extremely valuable this league with the super high cost of attacks. And you know what's cool ? The chest is super easy to craft. In fact all the rare gear in pob is self-craftable and easier than ever with the return of recombinator, even the 1000pdps staff isn't hard to craft with recombinator, so nothing is out of reach in the gear, really nothing. I'd say you can even achieve better gear with recombinator and insane recombination including delve or incursion exclusives mods.

And if the dps ever seemed low to you on the pob, note that it's just my guess about the number because pob can't do the math with explosion and overlap itself, so it might be higher or lower in game, and my guess is that is gonna be higher in game because pob doesn't calculate the impale dps with all the extra-hit we get from explosions.

I will try to do before tomorow a league start version of this for myself and post it here if someone is ever interested in trying out this skill.