Dominating Blow in 3 25 and Beyond - Build Guide

[ Cardboard Bastards - Winkers - Dominating Blow Champion Build Guide - Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@cardboardbastards | Build Guide Video: <URL Here> ] Level how you wish! Dominating Blow will *not* be ideal at level 28, you simply don't have the minion support for it. It gets good once you have tangible minion damage investment, meaning you can switch early if you have a Timeless Jewel lined up in advance. A strong Timeless Jewel will TRIVILIAZE the campaign, so don't be shy about having that ready to go. League start version of this guide will be a 3.26 thing. A NOTE ABOUT DPS - War Banner is not counted as placed, we only account for having 6 basic Sentinals, and Vaal Domination is not active. Also, placing War Banner with max charges gives us 3 Frenzy Charges, and against a real boss we would probably switch out Awakened Melee Splash. With everything up, we actually do way, WAYYY more DPS than shown. Easily more than double. Elegant Hubris - The starting point for the build; this gives us 240% Minion Damage for 8 points (including the two points spent to access the jewel socket). With Dominating Blow of Inspiring and nothing else, this is a whopping SIX HUNDRED PERCENT increased damage for our hits. With Ashes of the Stars and a 20% quality gem, this increases to NINE HUNDRED PERCENT! It goes without saying that this build really, REALLY likes minion damage, and you should hunt it wherever possible. The current tree amounts to over 2000% increased damage on our attacks because of how hard this scales, and it's hardly min-maxxed. The ideal jewel appears to be 18400 Caspiro, but there are other options that are only slightly less point efficient. You can use PoB to calculate what jewels work, or use the tool at [ https://vilsol.github.io/timeless-jewels/tree ] Ashes of the Stars - This item is disgustingly, deceptively amazing for this build. A 30% gem quality Ashes gives us as follows: An additional 75% minion damage scaling to Dominating Blow of Inspiring, as well as a universal +1 Skill Gem Levels value, which is the only one that affects Dominating Blow. Gem levels are actually kind of decent for attacks now, and more importantly it has a massive effect on our actual minions. The %Gem Quality also lets us achieve 100% increased Cooldown Recovery Rate on Enduring Cry, Ancestral Cry, and Rallying Cry, as well as 50% Increased Cooldown Recovery Rate on Convocation. This one item completely handles our investment into Warcry + Convocation CDR, as well as giving us a huge boost across the board to other stats. Thread of Hope (Massive) - Less necessary, but very very good. This lets us pick up a number of high value passives without pathing to them, including Spiritual Command, which is mandatory for the build. This lets our minion attack speed modifiers apply to us, and gives us tremendous scaling options via various crafts, jewelry affixes, and ghastly eye jewels. Spiritual Aid - We have this built in to the gem. Do not take it unless you are using a normal Dominating Blow for some reason. Vaal Domination of Inspiring - This is EXTREMELY annoying to get on a 20% base, and probably the biggest hurdle to the build. If you can buy it, great. Otherwise, Doryani's gem double corrupts and a lot of labyrinth running are in your future. It's not *that* hard to just get a 20/20, but the fabled 21/20 is rather absurd, and honestly I feel a bit of transfigured gem fatigue with the added difficulty. That's on GGG though, hopefully someone at the company plays a build like this and realizes how obnoxiously burdensome this can be. Awakened Melee Splash - This gem is awesome, it gives us +1 Strike Gem levels, which applies to our minions. It gives us great coverage in our clear, and applies to our minion attacks as well. That said, it's rather overkill against a pinnacle boss, and even our exerted attacks lose a lot of value because of our attack speed, so Multistrike / Awakened Multistrike make for an ideal bossing switch. Warcries, Banners, and Rage - Titled in the order of importance. Warcries are everything, always, all the time. They're the everything bagel of our lives, and we love them. Enduring Cry gives us Regen and Massive Tank. Ancestral Cry gives us more Maximum Resistance and boosts our clear speed through the roof. Also, a flat resistance buff that can help in situations where our over-cap is low. Rallying Cry lets us give our minions a huge flat damage buff to their attacks, which is good, because we're not using Ghastly Eye Jewels to boost minion flat damage (we're using them for other stats) and they have tons of attack speed and %minion damage anyway. What's most important is that Enduring Cry and Ancestral Cry ALSO buff our minions by a significant amount, giving them crazy regen and shoring up their resistances. Banners are another group-wide buff, giving a huge physical boost, and because we're specced into Warcries, they fill up very, very quickly. Rage is the same, but the least important of the trio. For four points, you have fantastic uptime and another 40% more attack damage on you specifically, but not your minions. This against takes advantage of our warcries. Protection Mastery - We have this where it is to help a bit with degens, but mostly it's just 'in place' so that we can switch it to corrupting blood immunity when fighting Sirus. That's... most of its purpose. You can cut it if you feel like it's unnecessary. Equipment - This PoB is not using optimized equipment. I'm running out of time to play this league, so I'm showing what I have and the effectiveness therein. This gear is largely garbage, and could be wildly better. The pieces that aren't garbage are more on the mandatory side, so prioritize those first. Resistances can be tight at times; consider siding with Alira for the long-term until you have really great suffixes to cover it. A +2 Minion Helmet with good suffixes is worth its weight in gold (and people will charge you about that much as well...). Our current Armour has no life rolls, but a good Royal Plate is just fine with one, so we'd likely unspec from the life mastery we're currently using once that's replaced. Ancestral Cry is perfectly fine early on for our additional strike target needs, but you still want that eldritch implicit once you're in maps if only for the ability to stand at arms length when smacking certain bosses. Weapon - Get a big, effective smacker of a 2-handed weapon. Axes have the best DPS, so probably focus here when you go shopping for something serious. You can Runeforge a rather large %minion damage modifier, and as this affects all aspects of the build evenly so I recommend it. With a good enough weapon, %phys might outperform it. My current weapon isn't 'complete' by any means, and ideally would have an open suffix to craft minion attack speed on as well. Enduring Bond - This is the annoint I use, because it's decent value and gives a lot of duration for our minions. Very high QoL, but maybe not the highest throughput if that's what you're after. Darkness Enthroned - Ghastly Eye Jewels can give us up to 20% increased minion damage, a life roll, an armour roll, and minion attack speed. That said, in Darkness Enthroned, we actually give some suffixes to Chaos Resistance to shore that up. This mod is oppressively rare however, and you're best off shopping for a fractured base and crafting from there. Dark Marionette - Spectres!? Yes, the kind you don't have to worry about. These resurrect automatically after 4 seconds, and manage the Feeding Frenzy buff and Maim debuff. Maim's debuff is pretty huge with Pride / Flesh and Stone. Flesh and Stone now gives %More Physical damage to hits taken by enemies, and Pride is similar. These multiply the INCREASED damage taken mods the same way More Damage Multipliers interacted with Increased Damage Multipliers, so things like Intimidate, Shock, and the Maim Debuff are significantly more effective than normal. You could run just one Dark Marionette and pick up another spectre for support if you like; they end up being pretty durable if played correctly, but I'd recommend against anything you can't store in a Desecrate. Cluster Jewel - We use a Warcry Medium Jewel to give us Onslaught (100% uptime) and a massive %Armour buff (50% anytime, 100% with a unique enemy near by). Enduring Mana Flask - I recommend this. You won't need it against a target with all the right nodes in place, but it makes the mapping feel much smoother with how little floating mana we have available. You may not be able to run all auras even with the reservation nodes at lower levels, so be patient and introduce Flesh and Stone last when you're ready. Warcry Buff Effect - We have a couple skill points snagging a little bit more of this, as well as the Warcry Buff Effect eldritch implicit on our chest. This scales Ancestral Cry's max life so that it gives 2% Max Res per 10 power. The eldritch implicit on the body armour can be swapped out if you can get the Korrel craft on your helmet, but that would be an extremely expensive helmet with all the affix competition there already. That said, with it swapped out, +1/2 Max Res on the Body Armour gets us to that glorious 89/90% All Elemental Maximum Resistances. The Forbidden Upgrade - No, this isn't jewel commentary. The most portent upgrade offered to the build pretty much overall is a +4 chest, because it wildly scales our minions up in a really, really strong way, as well as giving us (the character) something like 13% more dps. If you try the build, I hope you enjoy it. I may post updates as I play it more, but my time is going to become split in the near-future, so the guide was made now to get it out there. Don't be afraid to message me (Winkers91) in game if you have questions, or to try your luck in the comments of a video. I may be streaming some War Within stuff, and you're welcome to ask me about Path of Exile stuff there as well. Happy Dominating, Exiles!