3.4 Varunstra Molten Strike Champion (usually cheap/league start)

Main links for early leveling:
Molten Strike - Ancestral Call - Conc Effect/AoE - WED or Vicious Projectiles

Main links for endgame, in order of importance:
Molten Strike - Ancestral Call - Conc/AoE - Inc crit - WED - Vicious projectiles

Other links:

Leap Slam or Whirling Blades - Faster attacks - Fortify (- Blood magic if you aren't sustaining it on mana alone)

If you go with whirling blades, you should still keep a leap slam socketed somewhere for crossing gaps/walls.

Cast When Damage Taken - Immortal Call (- Increased Duration if you have room for it)

Hatred

Herald of Ash (clearspeed) or Herald of Purity (bosses)

Ancestral Protector

Blood Rage

http://poeurl.com/b4SV

If you're having resist problems, help Alira and re-spec later. You can also take the "Cloth and Chain" node below Duelist start. Lategame, you want all three bandits killed for the skill points.

Note the two extra STR nodes - those are for the Molten Strike threshold jewels.

For ascendancy points, Conqueror -> Worthy Foe -> First to Strike -> Either Unstoppable Hero or Inspirational.

The last point is kind of a waste either way. Inspirational is 35% damage and movespeed that's useless because we use a movement skill that ignores MS, and unstoppable hero is mostly useless because we already can't be stunned due to having Kaom's Roots, and the 30% melee damage doesn't help MS balls.

Note that if you haven't transitioned to (dual) Varunastra yet, you should prioritize skillpoints that help whichever weapon class you're using.

First weapon purchases:

Buy two decent claws. "Allure" is cheap and good, just mind the int requirement. At that stage, you'll likely have to grab a +30 node. Rive, Wasp Nest, Bloodseeker, Izaro's Dilemma and Touch of Anguish are all usable as an early weapon. Just don't get Essentia Sanguis due to the leech modifier.

Depending on how fast you're making money, either go straight for dual Varunastra, or one Varunastra and one Bloodseeker:





Especially early on, before your HP gets built up, the Bloodseeker instant leech helps a lot.


Chest:

\
Loreweave is also a usable option, but more expensive.

Boots:



The rest of the gear is very generic:




Jewels:


and then crit multi/attack speed/damage jewels. Note that projectile damage benefits you, but anything that says "melee" will not - it does not affect the projectile portion of molten strike.

There's not much to it. Leveling works exactly the same as endgame. Molten Strike is both your single target and AoE skill. It has no weapon restrictions, so just use whatever you find that has good DPS.

For optimal single target DPS, there's a certain distance you can stand away from a boss, where the balls from your main attack will hit them, but ancestral call will still choose the boss as a secondary target. Theoretically, this could provide up to an 84% DPS increase, but in reality it's probably closer to about a 50% boost.

PoB link: https://pastebin.com/HUkn6vU1

Shaper/Guardian DPS:



Note this is per-ball - with the two threshold jewels, you'll have 7 balls. This puts it at about 910k DPS with fairly unimpressive gear. This is not accounting for the ancestral call trick, which would give you probably somewhere around 1.4m. If you can't get used to doing that, or the boss moves around too much, you can switch ancestral call for Added Fire or Fire Penetration, and get about the same DPS.

There are two options for going higher budget with this build. You can continue with Molten Strike, or you can transition to BF+Reave.

For Molten Strike, go for Steel Rings, a good Abyss belt, and some good jewels. Grab some more jewel sockets on the tree. You can also get the Molten Strike projectiles helmet enchant.

You can also look at getting weapon corruptions. Pretty much all of the one-handed sword corruptions will help you, except Resolute Technique.



The other option is to transition to BF+Reave. Most of the gear is the same, except with a stat stick in place of the second Varunastra. You'll also want to get a piece of 5L gear (or pseudo-5L) like this, for Reave:




The helm was 35c and the stat stick was 1ex.

The main advantage of this is that Reave has significantly better AoE clear than MS. MS isn't bad with ancestral call, but 8 stack Reave+Vaal Reave+Increased AoE basically clears an entire screen, while BF's single target damage is approximately the same as MS. It also has a higher gear cap due to allowing for a stat stick.

Basically, we get:

30% more damage
6% reduced damage taken
100% chance to hit.

The last one is especially important, since crit rolls against accuracy twice. Even a character with 92% chance to hit would receive about 15% more damage from having 100% chance to hit, assuming the majority of their damage comes from crits. This allows us to completely ignore accuracy on gear, which helps keep the budget low.

Most of the credit goes to Slayerx117, since this build is pretty much a Molten Strike adaptation of his Reave/BF champion.