3.21 Champion of the Armageddon brands

Pro's
- Visually pleasing
- Very linear and rewarding progression. You just keep on improving
- Great map clear
- No mana cost's
- Decent boss damage
- Viable from league start to league finish
- Very tanky
- Immune to all elemental ailments

Con's
- If you choose to use Melding of the Flesh you do need your suffixes for resistances due to negative resistances penalty on this jewel.
- Enemies that can not be taunted are annoying as you'll be missing both damage done and damage reduction against them but they can still be done.
- Slow start until you can switch to brands at lvl 32
- While getting the devouring diadem is easy to do in SSF, getting the Melding of the Flesh jewel and the correct forbidden flesh/flame jewels are nearly impossible. While they are not mandatory for the build they to make it relatively easy to get to 90% all resistances and some extra juice for your aura.s Without those jewels you can still easily reach 82 or maybe even higher all resistances though. Not AS good but still great.
- Not a very slow pinnacle boss killer but not the fastest either

Deadly modifiers
The only guaranteed death is Elemental reflect. Avoid that at all costs.

Non-Lethal but still unplayable modifiers
Any modifier that completely prevents energy shield from regenerating is unplayable as we use our ES as mana. No mana means no using skills. What do you wanna do? stare the mobs to death?

Annoying but playable modifiers
- Any modifiers that reduce but do not prevent life or energy shield regeneration are quite annoying. You can still run the maps but you'll need to be a bit more careful and you might have some trouble keeping your zealotry going.
- Modifiers that reduce your aoe affect your clear speed a little
- Modifiers that reduce duration of your ability's make you have to spam your zealotry and brands more often.
- Modifiers that reduce your (maximum) resistances. You have a lot of those but you either need to play a bit more carefully or risk a portal if you juiced your map.

Modifiers that don't do anything
We are immune to ailments so any modifiers that do something with ignite/shock/freeze/chill are nice to roll as they will increase map rarity/quantity but wont affect you in any way. We also don't use mana so any modifiers to that are good as well.

Elemental overload
As this build leans on a quite heavy investment in to brands and defenses there isn't a lot of room left to do meaningful investments in crit. We also don't have room for investment in ignite either. We do however reach somewhere around 10% crit chance for our spells and that means that we do crit enough to trigger Elemental overload and keep it up 100% of the time. This provides us a flat 40% more damage boost

Aura's
Offensively we only use Zealotry with divine blessing and Herald of ash. Both give more (fire)spell damage and are really straight forward. The overkill burn from Herald of Ash is a nice bonus but does nothing for our clear speed.

Righteous Fire
Due to the build's high defenses and life recovery capability's we can safely use Righteous fire. RF itself wont deal any noticeable damage but it will grant us a buff that gives us 43% more spell damage while it's active. A massive boost. If you have the money you could also get the divergent variant of it which grants a small additional 20% increased (not more) spell damage

Ascendancy
With the Champion's "Conqueror" ascendancy we taunt with each hit that we do. The "Worthy foe" ascendancy causes taunted enemies to take 20% increased damage. This damage is calculated before any mitigation's so this basically means we do 20% more damage to our enemies.

Exposure
While Awakened Fire exposure gives a 10% chance to apply exposure on hit it will only apply a 10% version and the chance for it to be applied is quite low. Instead we use non-influenced rare gloves and roll it with "inflict fire exposure (11 to 16%) on hit" from the eater of worlds. This gives us 100% up-time and a higher exposure.

Unnerve
Another thing we will be rolling on our gloves is the Searing Exarch modifier that gives us 20% chance to unnerve enemies on hit. Unnerved enemies take 10% increased spell damage and this stacks additive with other sources so together with our taunt's enemies are sitting at 30% increased damage taken at this point.

Covered in Ash
With our Polaric devastation ring we cover enemies that we ignite in Ash.
While we can only ignite by using firestorm we will mostly only cover the tougher mobs and bosses in Ash. Enemies covered in Ash will get a additional 20% increased damage taken and also a 20% reduced movement speed buff.
This bonus is also added to the 30% we already had from unnerve and taunt raising the grand total against ignited enemies to 50% increased damage taken.

Flammability
We will be using a curse on hit ring that curses enemies with flammability when we hit them reducing their fire resistance and thus increasing our damage.

Fortify
The champion ascendancy "Fortitude" gives us a permanent 20 fortification and that means we'll always take 20% less damage taken from any hit even when we are not in combat.

Ascendancy's
With the Conqueror ascendancy we get 10% reduced damage taken if we taunted recently. As long as we have a brand or firestorm up we will be taunting multiple times a second so it would be safe to say that this buff is always up and it works against ALL damage we take, even dot's like bleed and our own righteous fire.

Armour
This build has the potential for good amounts of Armour greatly reducing the physical damage that we take. A large part of our Armour comes from determination and defiance banner.

Endurance charges
We get endurance charges by using Enduring cry and from our "Inexorable" talent that has a 25% chance to grant a charge when we get hit. Each endurance charge gives us 4% physical damage reduction which is nice.

90% all elemental resistances
This build has already a great baseline for resistances due to the talent tree and you can easily get to 81% all resistances by using the Prismatic Skin and the Soul of steel talents together with the eater of worlds +1(or2) all resistances roll on a chest piece. This build can take it a step further by using the "Melding of the Flesh" jewel which caps ALL of our elemental resistances at the maximum of our highest elemental resistance instead.

When using MotF we use its full potential as we raise our fire resistance to 90% by using purity of fire and by getting maximum fire resistance from searing exarch/eater of worlds implicit's on our rare body armour and boots.
I've chosen fire resistance here as that's what I could get the rolls for but you can also do this using cold or lightning resistance, it does not matter as long as you can raise 1 of them to 90%.

Feast of Flesh
By using the devouring diadem we get a automatically cast "Feast of Flesh" every 5 seconds. While it doesn't seem like much it actually boils down to a full life, mana, and energy shield bar each time it triggers as it seems to scale with increases to life recovery.
Feast of flesh consumes up to 10 corpses and we gain 400 Life, 200 Mana and 400 Energy Shield per corpse Consumed. At 10 corpses that would mean we gain at least 4k life.

Molten shell
With the build getting between 30 and 50k armor easily it's a great opportunity to run with a cast when damage taken + molten shell set-up.
Molten shell gives that stores an amount equal to 20% of our armour when we cast it. 75% of incoming damage is then taken from this pool instead of our life until the pool is either depleted or the buff has expired.

Elemental ailment immunity
We run Purity of elements and that means that we are immune to all of the elemental ailments.

High life regeneration And life steal
With this build you will be getting a lot of life regeneration from your talents. Combined with "increased life regeneration rate" rolls on items it is no hard task to gain around 1k life regeneration per second even while running righteous fire.
Add around 1k life steal in the mix that we could rather easily get from a watcher's eye, a regular jewel, or a amulet and you'll be recovering at least 2k life per second while in combat. Having both leech and regeneration also prevents you from having a big problem if 1 of the 2 is disabled for what ever reason (looking at you arch nemesis mobs)

Decent life pool
Together with the high flat damage reduction from the high resistances and fortify we also have a pretty decent pool of life making us able to take quite a lot of those small hits.

Enduring cry
If despite all these defensive layers we still see our life pool get frighteningly low then we can press our panic life recovery button named "Enduring cry" This skill's tooltip tells us that it recovers just over 2k life over 1 second but what it doesn't tell us is that it scales with our increases to life recovery rate and that the actual value will be around 3k per second. A great way to quickly refill that life bar.

The play style is very straight forward and suitable for both experienced and beginning players.

Due to the defenses it is a very forgiving build. Getting hit by big packs or boss ability's wont kill you and you will have the time to react when presented with particularly high damage situations. There are also no fancy mechanics or ability's you need to use to utilize to maximize the defenses, they are always there and you don't need to think about those.

On the damage department it is also very easy.
With a maximum of 7 brands and with the damage they deal individually you just run around and toss a brand or 2 at each pack you see.
The the area's of the brands overlap so multiple active brands in a single area means more damage.
While clearing maps brand placement is not that important and you'll quickly get the hang of that. One thing that you should keep in to account is that there is a small delay on the brand's first activation but you won't need to wait for this.

On boss fights (or extreme mobs) you'll have to keep 2 brands up on the boss and throw in a occasional Firestorm so that the boss will be ignited. The ignite will cause the boss to be ignited which in turn activates combustion's reduction in fire resistance and the covered in Ash debuff which also causes the boss to take more damage. Keeping both the brands and the firestorm ignite up is easy and you can move around while they are active making dodging easy as well.

After extensive playtesting I could not really notice much difference between the pantheons but in the end I preffered the following setup

Major
Here I like to take take "Soul of Arakali" as this reduces the damage over time we take by 10%. It will reduce the damage we take from bleeds and poisons which are the weakest part of our defenses. It will also reduce the damage we take from our own righteous fire so that we are left with more life regeneration.

Minor
Here we take "Soul of Shakari" and upgrade it with "The Restless shade" as soon as we can to reduce chaos damage taken so that we have high damage reduction against every possible type of damage.

Kill them all.

There is are no mandatory enchantments or anoints here so we just take what gives us most damage.
As far as helm enchants go the Fire penetration for Armageddon brand adds the most flat damage.
For anoints I prefer Disciples of the slaughter as that gives us a minimum frenzy charge and a way of generating more of them while mapping

The first ascendancy we take is "Conqueror". This will cause us to taunt on hit and reduce the damage we and our allies take.

From here you have to choose between tank first or damage first. As I am playing trade league I will choose to do damage first and will take the "Worthy foe" ascendancy as my next step. After that I finish up by taking "Unstoppable hero" which does nothing yet at this point but will give some Armour, evasion, and stun immunity once we take "Fortitude".
You could also take Worthy foe last if you prefer early fortify over early damage.

To start I suggest going straight to the top of the tree taking "Constitution" and then going to "Sanctity" followed by "Retribution" and then "Amplify".
From there I take "Elemental overload. By this time we should be somewhere around level 30 and we can start preparing for our transition to Armageddon brand. Before we do that I'd recommend first getting the Runesmith wheel and the Runebinder keystone so that when you switch you feel like you just got a massive boost. After this I'll take the last Brand wheel and start getting some life and the reservation reduction wheels so that we are prepared for level 54 at which point we could get our diadem and all of our aura's running.
Once you are done with that it is up to you do decide if you want more damage or more survivability. The PoB included takes a balanced approach to this.

Important note before starting to gear: I am listing the gear I reccomend as it's relatively cheap and easy to obtain. There is a lot of room to experiment though.

The stats we do need to get from our gear to make the build feel that much smoother are the keystone "Eldritch battery" to make our ES protect mana.
We also want to get some extra jewel sockets so any large cluster jewel with max 8 passives will do. The rolls on the jewel itself are not that important and only add more damage, tankyness or utility. The main focus is the extra jewel socket.
We will also need to get life leech from somewhere, this can be obtained trough a amulet, watchers eye (vitality / anger), or megalomaniac / small cluster jewel (armour or fire res).


Helmet - unique: The Devouring Diadem
This helmet is the only mandatory item in the build. It requires level 54 and can be obtained by killing Catarina the final boss of the Immortal Syndicate.
As it's among the highest drop rates together with the flask you normally only need a few tries to get it and it's easy to get in SSF as well. For trade league it's quite pricy early but always quickly drops to only a couple of chaos in a week or 2 so it's perfectly obtainable for everyone.

The helmet does 3 things for us
It gives us Eldritch Battery and that takes care of all our mana issues in 1 fell swoop so it is a real quality of life improvement for basically no investment.
The second thing it does is that it gives a 25% increased reservation efficiency for socketed gems which allows us to run with 2x 50% aura, a 35% one and a 25% herald.
The third has already been covered in the defenses section but it boils down to a full life pool every 5 seconds due to feast of flesh.

Ring - unique: Polaric devastation
The polaric Devastation is a unique ring that when fitted in the left ring slot will cover enemies on ash when you ignite them. This causes enemies to take 20% increased fire damage and have 20% less movement speed and is the reason why we want one of our spells, in this case Firestorm to apply ignites. You wont be using this effect while clearing normal mobs but once you find a tougher mob like a boss then you can apply this for a nice extra boost.
The ring is in no way mandatory but as far as I could see it was one of the best AND cheapest ways to get a significant damage boost.

Ring - rare: curse on hit ring
As we are starved for skill gem slots like many other builds out there we use a curse on hit ring to apply our flammability. At the very least you want one that gives the curse and some life. Upgrade options could be one that gives resistances as well or allows for some more damage by crafting increased damage or minimum frenzy charges or that has a increased (fire/spell) damage roll or cast speed roll.

Weapons - rare
For this build I prefer and recommend dual wielding wands as this is overall both the cheapest and the best option for dps.
You could however choose to go for a staff or for a 1 handed weapon and a shield for more defenses. Scepters are also fine.

Regardless of the weapon(s) you choose the stats you are looking for on your weapon will be the same.
In order of importance:
Prefixes
1 - Increased levels of spell skill gems, the more the better, Preferablly All spell skill gems but Fire spell skill gems specifically also works
2 - Increased spell (or fire) damage,
3 - Adds # to # fire damage to spells
Suffixes
1 - Increased cast speed
2 - Increased (fire/spell) damage
3 - Any other mod of your fancy

Body armour - rare
For a body armour we'd prefer a armour+energy shield armour like a Saintly chainmail. The reason we want this is because we do need some energy shield (around 800 total) so that we can cast our 3-link Divine blessing + increased duration + zealotry. Our helmet already gives us some energy shield and the best way to get the rest is by either using a full ES body armour or a hybrid version.
Apart from some ES to reach the 800 mark we are looking for basic rolls on our body armour, As always we want Life and resistances(if not yet capped).
Other stats are based on personal preference. Some useful ones could be life regeneration, additional physical damage reduction, increased % life, etc.
Mostly defensive stuff.
Or you could go expansive and go for a extra curse one and try to get either a polaric devastation with a curse corrupt or a ring with both a synthesized curse (implicit) and a suffix curse (warlord) but that has been out of my budget. A final option would be to get a chest that provides additional levels for socketed (support)gems

Boots and gloves - rare
For your boots and gloves you want to have either full armour or hybrid armour/es items as those are the only ones that can roll the increased life regeneration rates on them which are our most desired stat after life, movement speed, and resistances. Also make sure that there are no influences outside of the searing exarch/eater of worlds on there so that we can roll the modifiers we want on there. You can't roll them on other influenced items or uniques

Belt - rare
Belt is simple.
As always the first thing you need to do is cap your resistances including chaos resistance.
Second is to get as much life as humanly possible.
If possible you can craft a prefix on there that gives up to 16% increased damage.

Amulet - rare
Obviously you'll want life again.
Other then life you'll want to look for increased gem levels and once you've got that you could either go for some fire damage leeched as life, resistances, or a empty suffix so that you can craft +1 to minimum frenzy charges, or all of the above but that would be outside of my budget.

Jewel - Optional: Melding of the Flesh
Without MotF we can easily get over 80% all resistances which is already very high especially considering our other defensive layers as well and there for Motf is completely optional. If you do choose to use it however you need to raise 1 of your resistances to 90% in order to make the best use of it. It does not matter which of your resistances you raise to 90% so choose the one you can get to 90 the easiest/cheapest at the time.

Some other hints to get you going:
- Gloves can be upgraded with searing exarch / eater of worlds implicit's to unnerve and expose enemies or could be corrupted to apply curses.
- There are uncorrupted synthesized rings that have a curse on hit impllicit. You could slam these with a Warlord's exalt so that you get warlords influence on them and then roll flammability on hit on there so that you get a double curse on hit ring.
- Chests and amulets can roll various variations of +# levels of gems variants. Variations that work for this build are (both all and/or socketed)
+# levels of (spell) skill gems (brand + aura's)
+# levels of fire (spell) skill gems (brand + purity of fire and herald)
+# levels of strength skill gems (brand + all aura's except zealotry)
+# levels of intelligence skill gems (brand + all aura's except determination)
+# levels of support gems (works on empower thus indirectly boosting brand level)

While gearing is easy on this build it helps to understand how the stat scaling works and where there are potential hidden benefits.

Area of Effect
At first glance this just straight up increases the radius of your Brand and Firestorm. Pretty straight forward and a nice boost for our map clear speed with Armageddon brand. Firestorm's aoe is big enough on its own for the use on bosses so it wont do much for that. As both of our spells only deal AOE damage any kind of increase to area damage scales just as well as other sources of increased damage (spell/fire/damage).

Spell effect duration
The build does not have great access to increased duration but it is a nice stat to have if you can get your hands on it. It causes your Brand to have both longer attached times as well as detached times. It also causes your firestorm and it's ignites to last longer and divine blessing also benefits from it. Summarized, you need to cast your abilities less often in a boss fight leaving you more time to run around.
For brands it also gives the brand more time for additional activation's.
Armageddon brand activates every 1.5 second by default so increasing the duration for which the brand is active means giving the brand more time to activate a additional time. While that doesn't increase its damage per second, it does increase the total damage a single brand does over its entire duration provided it gets enough increased duration to pull off another activation.

Cast speed
The clearly visible advantage to cast speed is that it makes our Firestorm cast quicker so that the time we stand still is reduced. This also applies to our other non-instant casts but it's most noticeable for Firestorm as that is otherwise a slow cast. Quicker casts means more time to move so that is the first benefit we get.

The second benefit is a bit more tricky.
On paper(PoB) cast speed directly increases our overall dps but that is not entirely true.
In the case of Firestorm we are not always casting it but often we only toss 1 or maybe a few mainly to trigger our ignites and in some rare occasions for the little extra damage that it does. Because of this the extra cast speed does not really add that much damage to it as that PoB claims it does.

For Armageddon brand there is also some knowledge that you need to take in to consideration.
First you have the cast time to lay down a brand, this is directly influenced by cast speed. It's already very quick but cast speed makes it quicker so you can spam brands faster. Once you've deployed a brand there is a short non-changeable time (0.15 sec i believe) before it attaches to an enemy.
Once attached the brand will start activating and dealing damage after seemingly a small delay.
Armageddon brand activates every 1.5 seconds by default and each activation deals damage. Cast speed reduces the time between each activation so that would benefit dps but here you need to know the following:
If the duration is 6 seconds and your activation time is 1.5seconds then that means your brand can activate 4 times. If you'd reduce the activation time to 1 second while keeping duration on 6 seconds then that would mean the brand can activate 6 times resulting in a higher dps. To get in a 7th activation you'd need a activation time of 0.85 seconds or lower and cast speed wont actually benefit your dps until you reach that next activation.

Critical strike chance
Due to Elemental Overload our crits deal no extra damage but they will still deal the same damage as non-crits. Because of this crit is not a stat we should pay much attention too, however EO does require you to crit at least once every 8 seconds in order to maintain a 100% uptime. By play testing I feel like the best spot to be at is between 7% and 10% chance to crit. Any more then that and nothing will happen, less then that and you might not have EO up 100% of the time and notice absolutely massive drops in damage when it isn't there. This is the reason why I am not running with "controlled destruction" as that would drop our crit to below 2% and at that point you will rarely have EO up and miss out on 40% more damage.

Critical strike multiplier
Our crits deal no extra damage so this is a wasted stat, ignore it.

Energy shield
We need around 800ES in order to be able to use our Zealotry in a 3link setup
with divine blessing and increased duration support. You could choose not to use increased duration so that you need to cast zealotry about twice as often though. That would reduce the energy shield needed to around 500. Any more then that is not needed, we also won't need energy shield leech or recovery rate as our ES will always be recharging at a high enough rate without any investment. Do avoid maps and items that prevent ES recharge though otherwise you'd be without "mana"

The build as it is now is focused on being quite tanky while still maintaining decent dps. You could greatly increase your dps by dropping the melding of the flesh jewel and rolling the "All max resistances" on your chest instead of fire resistance. This would leave you with around 80 to 82 all resistances which is still quite good and you won't need the 35% mana res from purity of fire anymore. This gives you that jewel slot to use for something else, and lowers the amount of resistance you need so you have some more room for different suffixes on your gear.

Another thing you could do is to get % of physical damage taken (from hits) converted to fire/cold/lightning damage taken instead. If you manage to transfer a good portion of physical damage taken to any other type then you could drop armor in its entirety giving you the option to use the mana reserved for determination for another buff like Anger for more offense or something like Grace to get around 65% chance to evade.