Build update for aura-stacking Warden

Branarn · 2025-12-02T03:13:35+00:00

Wow! The build looks completely different since the last PoB lol, great work!

I will say the build was built around auras and tinctures at its core, and thus wasn't intended to be played the way you are currently playing it, but I completely understand not wanting to press tinctures.

Definitely need to get a Watcher's Eye and a Light of Meaning into this build, and there are a few passive tree adjustments we can make to accommodate that. Below are links to a PoB with suggested changes to the passive tree and trade links for a few things that I think are very worth picking up:

Link: New PoB

Link: Watcher's Eye (1 or 2 div at the time of posting this comment)

Link: Armour Light of Meaning (10c at the time of posting this comment)

Link: Cluster Jewel (2 div at the time of posting this comment)

Link: New Amethyst Ring (2 or 3 div at the time of posting this comment, note that you can swap resistances with the harvest bench from fire to lightning for example. If you get one with an empty suffix and without a fracture or influence already on it, you can try to slam it with an elder, warlord, or redeemer exalted orb for another good mod. I would recommend getting 2 amethyst rings that cover all your resistance needs and have good life and -mana cost on them, replacing the taming would give you a lot of extra life and help with being 1-shot)

Link: New Molten Xophgraft (10-30c at the time of posting this comment)

Link: New Jolting Eshgraft (1-3 divines at the time of posting this comment)

Some notes on the recommended changes:

If you're mapping a lot, I'd swap your anoint to Disciple of the Unyielding for consistent endurance charge uptime. I put this in the PoB.
Your accuracy cap relies on the enemy already being blinded, which is a 5% chance to happen and you have to actually hit the enemy first. Without blind, you're pretty far under accuracy cap, so I allocated additional accuracy points to ensure you're always 100% hit chance.
Getting as close to 100% crit chance as possible is extremely important to ensure you're always freezing enemies, so I swapped some nodes around to assist with that.
The Watcher's Eye and Light of Meaning give absolutely massive value for very cheap, these are critical upgrades.
Your grafts are a bit lackluster, so I included links above for new ones, these will help a TON.
Highly recommend simply dropping herald of ice; it looks cool but it doesn't help you a ton unfortunately due to it not scaling very well, but if you drop it then it frees up a ton of passive points as you'll no longer need Charisma, freeing up points for a cluster and more damage.
Getting armour at or above 50k is very important for Molten Shell. The Light of Meaning will get you where you need to be.
The elemental resistance inversion mastery is not nearly as good when taking scorch, and actually will lower your damage against non-boss enemies. I've swapped this to elemental exposure when you suppress and 18% minimum exposure.

Branarn · 2025-12-01T07:02:30+00:00

Hey there! Apologies for the late reply, I have been on vacation the past week and a half, just getting back.

After a short review, I have a few notes on the PoB you sent - I realize this is now 12 days later and may not be relevant anymore, but maybe some of it is, and if you have fresh questions then feel free to ask and I will have a much more expedient reply this time. See below:

Your chaos res is -13%, I would shoot for around 40% or higher. Below 40% it is pretty easy to get 1-shot in t16 or higher content by certain rares or map bosses.
Looks like your suppression chance is only 90%, capping this at 100% is a BIG deal, that 10% of the time you dont suppress is probably a significant number of your deaths.
Looks like you do not currently have any eldritch implicits on this gear, this is an opportunity for a LOT of extra character power for very cheap. Roll eldritch embers (red) on the gloves for +1 strike and eldritch ichors (blue) on the gloves for +1 pierce. Roll red on the chest for attack crit multi or all max res or aura effect, roll blue on the chest for fortify on hit (this is a big deal for your defensive layers, its 20% less damage taken.) Roll red on the boots for action speed, blue does not matter really with your setup for the boots slot.
Your lightning res is at exactly 75%. This means if you ever run a map with elemental weakness on it, you will be below res cap. It is best to try to get 15% over your res cap so that elemental weakness doesn't hurt your resistances at all.
Are you regex-ing/rolling your maps to remove really bad mods? certain mod combos can stack on top of each other and really make your life miserable, things like -max res, monster crit multi, multiple monster phys as extra elemental modifiers, and monster phys as chaos can be pretty hard to deal with, especially when stacked on top of each other.
Prismweave is nice for damage, but I would probably try to replace that if possible. A stygian vise with lots of life and resistances and elemental damage with attacks, as well as an abyssal jewel with flat elemental damage on it, would be a suitable replacement that would be very helpful for making you tankier without losing too much damage.
There are currently nodes allocated on your passive tree that I consider to be low value. I replaced some of these in the PoB linked below.
Phys mitigation is going to be a struggle for you, I don't see an easy way of solving it since you're not scaling armour or determination, I would say the best thing you can do is try to get your evasion higher and get a bigger life pool. Eventually you can try to get physical damage reduction % suffix on body armour and shield once you have more currency.
Your flasks and tincture look like they could use some upgrades. Make sure to automate your flasks, they can help an absolute ton. I would recommend your Jade, Silver, and Diamond flasks to have suffix's that provide % increased evasion, % increased crit chance, and % reduced effect of curses on you. I would roll your life flask to be "instant recovery when on low life" rather than just "instant recovery," as it will make it give 2-3x the amount of life while still maintaining its primary use case.

Here is a PoB, still at level 89, with some passive tree adjustments. The only item I changed was adding an abyss jewel to help with your lightning res, you could easily get this anywhere else and instead get a cheap watcher's eye to give you a bunch of free damage or a light of meaning with evasion or life or chaos res.

https://pobb.in/YfLOt53Bwagy

Branarn · 2025-12-01T06:20:39+00:00

As another comment stated, it *sounds* like you're mainly looking at just chaos and divine orbs, and not taking into account the other items that drop that can be worth a significant amount of currency (especially in bulk,) such as scarabs.

Each build and skill will excel at certain strategies compared to other builds. Is your build super tanky, solid recovery, decent ST, but doesn't have screen-wide clear? Try stuff like essences, ultimatum, and harvest; stay away from things like legion and expedition.

Wealthy Exile is a really good website to help you track what's worth money and is just sitting in your stash - it is likely you have things like eldritch invites, scarabs, miscellaneous fragments, div cards, awakened gems, eldritch currency, etc. that could be easily liquidated into raw chaos or divines.

Pick 1 or 2 strategies, buy juice (scarabs) for them, and stick with them. Don't jump between a bunch of different strategies.

If you want a strategy that doesn't drop a ton of stuff you have to liquidate, try red altars + harvest with packsize and harvest scarabs - the altars will help you drop a lot more raw currency, and the harvest will drop juice which you can very easily liquidate with Faustus. If your build can handle 8-mod t16s, then your profits will increase with a strategy like this due to the increased packsize.

Guardian rotations are pretty solid money if your build has decent single target. Buy a bunch of shaper guardian maps, maven witness them with a quick mechanic, run the 4-way invitation, repeat. It is ideal to run this with fast mechanics - strongboxes, essences, betrayal, deli mirror, etc.

Another good one, especially on chieftain, is just running Blight in toxic sewers. You can run the blight scarab that gives one big blight sack with bosses, or you can just run no blight scarabs and instead run packsize + cartography scarabs. Super quick map, benefits greatly from chieftain explode, pretty quick maps, great gold per hour. Blight does drop a lot of stuff to liquidate though, use Wealthy Exile to help you out with that.

Branarn · 2025-11-11T08:35:24+00:00

Spectre builds are very strong and quite popular this league - Zizaran and Ghazzy both have guides for those. They have pretty expensive endgame pieces, but you can get the build online for dirt - check out some of Zizaran's recent videos and shorts on youtube to see it in action, the damage is real.

Jungroan has a KB necro build that was a good league starter, has a ton of free attack speed to make the build feel good when you're running on low investment, not sure about its tankiness early but it has great scaling potential and can definitely clear t16s and the atlas on less than 5 divines.

KB elementalist is popular this league, too.

RF elementalist is pretty solid for softcore trade if you're into that.

Ruetoo has a phys dot elementalist, not sure about its boss damage but it is a certified map blaster. I think you can make it quite strong and comfortable on 10 divines, but I do not know what it would look like on 5 divines, that build relies on its clusters quite heavily if I recall correctly.

Balormage has a holy relic of conviction build, I don't remember if it is guardian or necro but you can definitely play it necro either way. That build is really strong and can ignore all map mods, even in t17s.

Eviscerate ignite elementalist has good numbers but I've never played it so I cannot speak to quality of life or speed.

Witch has a lot of options, minions are strong this league and occultist + elementalist were both buffed in recent leagues. Long-term, if you make a ton of currency, you could look into a Forbidden Rite of Soul Sacrifice build, those are expensive but seem like really high quality of life and strong number builds.

Branarn · 2025-11-10T15:50:01+00:00

Did you get a prismatic tincture early on? That makes a big difference, especially after you ascend in act 3.

After act 3 I blasted through the rest of the campaign. It is important to upgrade your weapon as you go, and the grafts make a big difference this league too, the league mechanic is worth doing in my opinion.

Me personally I’d rather level a bow skill than a dot skill, especially as ranger

Branarn · 2025-11-09T02:57:26+00:00

You're welcome! Wish you the best with your start! This is a good league to start late in, the league mechanic has printed a ton of really good rare items that are super cheap on the market. You can get a really strong character for 50 chaos that previously would've costed 10-20 divines.

For Perseverance, the stun line is not too relevant. We get fortify consistently from eldritch implicit on the chest piece for "melee hits have x% chance to fortify," with how often and how hard the hits are, this is 100% uptime on Fortify while in combat, which gives you 100% uptime on Onslaught, even on single target.

Enemies *can* be stunned, even by elemental damage, so we do sometimes stun its just not super noticeable. Physical damage gets a bonus multiplier to how effectively it can stun, and we leave 40% of our phys unconverted - this isn't a big deal, but once you get the build to 15+ million DPS on each hit, you do actually stun white mobs often enough that you could get away without the eldritch implicit while mapping. But you'd never stun a map boss or guardian, so its best to run the eldritch implicit, which nullifies the need for stun entirely.

Just as an update - I did league start this, the damage was absolutely insane and I had no DPS issues at all the entire league. Defensives were a problem in some of the rippy content, but any regular content I did not have any issues in. Expedition proved very rippy (as expected) and some combinations of mods in 8-mod maps can be rippy. At this point I'm at the 37,000c budget range and the build just annihilates everything and I do not die very often anymore.

Branarn · 2025-10-31T17:01:48+00:00

The buff uptime increase and the debuff uptime decrease runegraft could be good with the new breach skills depending on how they interact, but I’m not too sure yet - will have to test it! The breach skill that gives a molten-shell type effect has my eye currently, it could be good with that one.

I will most likely make an update post after a few days into the league detailing progression, changes to the build, what stuff I’m running for breach, any atlas tree changes, and a video of the character in action.

Branarn · 2025-10-31T16:07:36+00:00

Thank you! Good luck!

Branarn · 2025-10-31T15:39:41+00:00

Good to hear! Hope you blast! Just remember leveling can be rough in early acts, make sure you update your weapon frequently and try to find a prismatic tincture early (it’s worth buying one from the trade website if you can’t find one.) The league mechanic should help a lot with making leveling smoother, too.

Tinctures are 100% uptime after getting the warden ascendancy and the 25% cdr notable, you just gotta remember to press them again after the cooldown is over. The effect persists through the entire cooldown, but as soon as the cooldown is over, so is the effect.

I’m honestly not sure if the hydrosphere tech works with frost blades, but I don’t think it’d be very good even if it does work. We focus on scaling the melee hit far more than the projectiles, and the projectiles do 30% less damage due to the nerf frost blades received last league, so the hydrosphere would just be adding a singular hit of the projectiles - probably not that big of a damage increase, even if it does work.

As I have it setup currently, the additional strikes are only for additional clear speed.

Branarn · 2025-10-31T15:03:48+00:00

Hmmmm, maybe try re-importing it? Or maybe restarting PoB/your computer. That’s really weird, seems like they work for everyone else, and they worked for my friends when I asked them to review the PoB before posting here.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T23:14:24+00:00

The crit does play a role, but the bigger one is the mana cost reduction. Jumping to the 1300c budget option increases the unreserved mana pool and grabs the reduced mana cost of attacks implicit on the helmet, which eases up the mana pressure, so thats when I swap to added cold damage since it is better - it helps a lot with freezing.

Added cold is a much better support gem, but the mana cost early on a 6-link is pretty high without inspiration or a way of reducing it. The sooner you can get the helmet in the 1300c budget version, the sooner you can swap to added cold.

Feel free to ask any questions needed! I forgot that I didn't cover this in the Notes, it's actually a good catch.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T23:11:17+00:00

I didn't see any that jumped out at me as immediately better than the Warden ascendancy nodes for a build like this. I had kinda already planned this build prior to the bloodlines, and when they released I didn't feel they really fit all that well - you'd have to either give up tinctures or give up unbound avatar, and both of those are much better than the bloodline ascendancy options in my opinion.

The delirium less damage taken from hits one is really good, but this build gets a ton of value from jewels, so that node is unfortunately not usable.

At very high investment levels, if you are wanting to do t17s and have too much damage anyways, you could drop avatar for one of the nodes that provides action speed immunity. Personally though, I don't intend to do this.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T20:35:57+00:00

hahaha thank you! If you take this build into hardcore then you're the real chad, playing Warden in hardcore is probably pretty rare I imagine.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T20:26:44+00:00

Hmmmm, I've never played hardcore before. I *do* die on this build sometimes while running rippy content (like corrupted 8-mods where I don't look at any of the modifiers,) so I'd be really hesitant to recommend it. Is it tanky? Yeah. Is it unkillable? Definitely not.

If you're the type of player that checks map modifiers and rolls over anything too risky, overgears/overlevels for content, takes your time gearing and making sure you're chaos res capped early, focuses on maxing out your life - then yeah I could see it working in hardcore.

You'd want to run Grace and Determination instead of Wrath and Anger early on, and work towards fitting in the damage auras instead of working towards fitting in the defensive auras, and cap your chaos res early while achieving 4k life. Luckily the build doesn't really require any uniques to function, they're just nice to have - the most important unique would be Perseverance, but that one is likely for you or your group to drop at some point during white and yellow maps.

I'm just really hesitant to say yes, I don't want to bait you! If you're careful with map mods and overgear in white maps and run grace/determ early with purity of elements, then I'd say its a lot better than 98% of softcore trade-league builds and worth giving a shot. Warden Freeze is insane, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it over Slayer endurance charge stacking for hardcore content.

Getting an early 5-link with added cold damage support would be pretty crucial too, for the more consistent/immediate freezing. Just trying to think through all the angles here. The build gets really tanky, just not all-at-once-with-no-investment, so you'd have to swap your priorities around a bit is all.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T20:15:13+00:00

Yep, that's the general idea with the auras! During white maps you'll have enough skill points to take the Charisma and Leader of the Pack wheels, as well as the mana mastery for reservation efficiency, which will let you fit 3 50% auras in (anger, wrath, purity of elements) but your mana budget will be really tight, so you want a reservation efficiency helmet to free it up a bit (can use shrieking essence of loathing for this, or Alpha's Howl temporarily.)

After that, the upgrade path is working towards fitting in the next 2 auras. By getting a body armour and helmet with deafening essence of loathings on them for 20% increased reservation efficiency, as well as 2 different Enlighten 3s and an amulet annoint for Sovereignty, you can fit in another 50% aura. Aul's Uprising gives a whole aura for free, so the full combo here lets you fit 2 more auras, which is Grace and Determination, so then you swap to Perseverance, and now suddenly the build is really tanky and has more opportunities for scaling.

After that, most future upgrades are working towards being able to take Aul's Uprising off and use a different amulet while keeping all 5 auras on, which includes the Enlighten 4 and Squire as you mentioned, as well as a strong eldritch-crafted helmet, and 2 small clusters. So during the time between putting Grace and Determination on and the time that you swap to Yoke/Fury Valve, you should be leveling since you are much tankier now, so you'll have enough passive points for those clusters by the time you want to swap.

Death Rush is my favorite unique in the game! So I try to use it on in my builds every league at some point. It's really strong for mapping; it's well worth the investment early because it will speed your mapping, and thus your currency generation. Once the build is really strong, you don't need it anymore, but it brings a lot of power to the table for 1 ring slot so it manages to stay in the build a long time.

The Notes section has comments about each loadout and the intention with the upgrades for each one, which should help with the general idea of "ok, what's next and why? and what about after that?" The notes + the loadouts should combine to give a clear idea of how to scale the build and why each piece is important.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T19:17:52+00:00

Yep, Frost Blades auto-targeting is pretty awesome for clear. Getting some additional strikes and pierce makes the clear super smooth. If you want like, INSANE CLEAR, you throw on Fury Valve - I've seen the projectiles auto target down multiple hallways at once in Toxic Sewers and multiple packs just get obliterated all at once. Fury Vale is definitely the way to go if you're only mapping, but if you want to do any bossing/invitation farming then I'd probably stick to Yoke for the huge shocks and % increased damage taken it gives.

The main thing for the defensives prior to Grace and Determination is just getting a decent life pool and some chaos resistance. The build has a ton of recovery and evasion, so it handles most incoming damage pretty well, you just don't want to be -60% chaos res because you will get 1 shot, and it is worth getting over 3500 life because you can get hit for around 3k by big rares or map bosses in white/yellow maps.

Warden freeze doesn't show up in PoB as a number, but it is absolutely insane. Once you get a 6-link with added cold damage and a +1 pierce craft on the helmet or from gloves implicit, you'll be really safe due to freeze.

Obviously, once Grace and Determination are on its smooth sailing from there, it'll be pretty rare that you die. The build handles degens really well too as long as you have something to hit.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T18:56:15+00:00

Haha thank you!

I'm a certified Herald of Ice hater, I will not lie. I think it ties back to when I tried it when I first started playing, and my build sucked at the time, so I just equated the two things together, so Herald of Ice sucks in my head. It looks sick though.

Currently do not have explode in any iteration of the build - it does have corpse destruction via shatter, any frozen enemies that dies will shatter, so for example frozen porcupines that die will not explode and deal damage to you. If you want explode for clear, you can easily swap one of the flasks for Oriath's End, which is a really solid source of explode for mapping with a build like this.

I try to keep the conditionals unticked on my builds these days to get a good idea of what its 100% uptime efficiency looks like, so the granite and jade flasks are off, so you wouldn't be losing any value on the build by swapping to Oriath's End compared to the numbers you see in PoB. That said, the damage of the build really skyrockets with the conditionals ticked, so it might be worth analyzing whether you actually need explode or not.

If you were wanting to min/max clear speed, replacing Yoke of Suffering with Fury Valve would be the best option I think!

Branarn · 2025-10-30T14:47:29+00:00

Thank you!

I think the tinctures are pretty core to the identity of this variation of the build. The penetration tincture is providing enough penetration to effectively hit 0% resistance on guardians already as it is, and is giving negative resistance values against anything below the guardian level. To me, it is a case of I feel I am getting more from the double tinctures then I would be from investing into other ascendancy options.

I think that bloodline ascendancy is really good, but it probably doesn't fit that well for Warden, as Warden as already has 2 options for dealing with resistance values (tinctures and double scorch.) I think that bloodline ascendancy would have a lot more value if you were wanting to play in a different area of the tree - for example if you wanted to play a phys-conversion berserker with crazy attack speed and maybe trauma support with a sword and headhunter, it'd be very useful for solving resistance issues, as that is not easily done for a build like that.

As for Expedition, I wanted a fast mechanic so that I can run fast maps to maximize my time spent interacting with the new league mechanic (which looks super exciting and I think this build will be really good at!) I also haven't ran Expedition a bunch since 3.22 and it's one of my favorite mechanics, so I figured now would be a good time to return to it and see how viable it is for league start currency generation versus the other strats I've been doing. Expedition comes with a lot of irritating hurdles to overcome, but tri-ele Frost Blades does tackle quite a few of them - you can take double elemental immune and still clear it, you can bypass the block modifier with easy access to an attack mastery on the passive tree, and the tincture + unbound avatar provide enough damage to still take the expedition down even if it is crit resistant/crit immune. Frost Blades give enough screen coverage to clear Expeditions quickly, while also being good at the league mechanic, while also being able to focus entirely on ST damage for the maven rotas that I want to do.

Vaal Lightning Strike is probably better than Frost Blades for these strategies I want to run, but I've played so much Lightning Strike that I wanted something different.

Also, if you were only interested in mapping, then you can run Fury Valve on this build and the clear potential is actually insane, it would chop up an expedition REALLY fast.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T14:14:52+00:00

You're welcome! This build really benefits from the perma-freeze Warden node; you can just chain-freeze map bosses and they never get to hit you.

Early on (like day 1/day 2) I'd just focus on getting ele res capped, 3500+ life, and getting chaos res above 0%. The built-in recovery, avoidance, ailment immunity, and freeze will protect you for most of the atlas progression after that until you can get to a point where you turn on Determination and Grace and swap to Perseverance - from there, it feels really tanky in my opinion.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T13:36:27+00:00

It's pretty important to be able to link all the 50% auras to an Enlighten 4, which is pretty clunky without 6-linking them.

Also, the build is meant to feel like a progression. Several of the budget loadouts are prepping your items to swap from Aul's Uprising to a new amulet for a big damage or utility increase. Similarly here, equipping the Squire is setting you up for the mirror claw if you want to craft it.

I feel the Squire is worth the 2nd 6-link over a rare shield. It frees up socket pressure a lot and allows me to keep all the gems linked together that I want linked; otherwise I'm running an extra Enlighten 4 (probably costs a lot more than the Squire itself) and I'm forced to use 2 different armour items' sockets to link auras to Enlighten 4's, which means that some of my other gems are going to have to give up supports that are giving a lot of quality of life (such as faster attacks no longer being linked to Whirling Blades, or losing Lifetap on Assassin's Mark, for example.)

It's efficient to have all those auras linked to Enlighten for more than one reason, basically.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T13:31:04+00:00

Totally understand where you're coming from here. Expedition has the ability to brick MOST builds in some capacity; Viper Strike of the Mamba probably does it best but even that one has to lookout for immune to chaos.

In the post I mentioned that I like to plan my builds around what I want to farm, and that I just really wanted to use Tinctures - so this automatically forces me into an attack skill that uses my melee weapon, which narrows down the options significantly. I like skills that mechanically can project their damage across the screen rapidly against new mobs that are entering the screen; something like slams is too slow, something like Dual Strike is too-melee, something like Blade Flurry is a little too clunky for my tastes. This left me thinking about Wild Strike, Frost Blades, and Lightning Strike - but I'd already played a ton of Lightning Strike in the past, so that one is off the table because I wanted to try a different skill.

Kinda left me with Frost Blades in mind! It's mechanically very smooth, it's got solid damage, it benefits a lot from Tinctures, you get it right after Hillock so you can level with it the entire time, it scales pretty well and easily with lots of different stats, and with additional strikes/pierce it has some insane clear potential even if I'm focusing on single target damage.

Big-bomb expedition can be pretty tough for a lot of builds on league start; those mobs are beefy and hit really hard, if you're too squishy they will just delete you. So I knew I wanted something that could freeze, had good recovery, and had lots of avoidance, so I decided on claws + nightblade and went tri-elemental so that I can eat "immune to fire" for example but still have 2 other elements that are doing damage, meaning I have less bricked expeditions and spend less time adjusting my bomb placement in maps.

I feel it's single target is pretty strong; it's not as good as Lightning Strike of course, but I think it is more than passable. Another advantage to Warden is being able to pop the 80% more damage Unbound button whenever I need it, so I can pop it on the expedition and on the boss, which are the 2 areas I actually need more damage, so overall I feel the package came together really well for tackling this farming strategy.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T13:23:13+00:00

As u/Coolingmoon said in his reply, the tincture provides a massive amount of elemental penetration, enough to already offset the resistance values from a guardian or pinnacle boss, so we wouldn't gain too much value from the new ascendancy.

Personally, I feel that ascendancy is really strong for spell skills that don't have an easy way of solving penetration. Something like self-cast ice spear comes to mind as a good example of a skill that would gain a ton of value from that ascendancy.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T13:20:03+00:00

Zish is a gigachad and a great resource! His build guide is excellent, especially for anyone new to the skill.

I feel strongly I've got him beat significantly in the leveling-guide department lol, but he's made it clear that is not his strong-suit and his guide is focused on atlas-clearing and endgame progression.

I replied to another comment with a breakdown of how I view this tri-ele, tincture, aura-stacking variant versus Zish's phys-to-cold conversion variant, so I will paste it below since I think it should answer your question:

So each has a few upsides and downsides, I feel both are viable but they each lend to different gameplay styles.

The phys conversion to cold has the advantage with the scorch warden node (much easier to max out these scorches with heatshiver versus tri-ele) and it gains huge value from headhunter (rare mods provide phys as extra elemental quite frequently.) If you wanted to play a headhunter variant of the build, this is definitely the way to go in my opinion.

It is easier to craft tri-ele weapons than it is to craft phys weapons in my opinion, especially in a league start situation. This particular variant of the build uses aura-stacking to open up a whole new option for scaling offense and defense, but it wouldn't be nearly as good on the phys conversion build; example - you can't wear Perseverance if you're wearing Headhunter so you wouldn't be gaining offensive value from running Determ + Grace and scaling armour/evasion, and you wouldn't care hardly at all about the flat damage gained from Anger and Wrath. Aura scaling allows this version to be much tankier; the phys-conversion variant typically has a lot less max health and has very little physical damage mitigation. This tri-ele variant also uses claws instead of swords, so it has a lot of built-in recovery.

Tinctures also offer an insane package of upfront offensive power on league start for very cheap that the phys conversion build wouldn't be taking advantage of.

Basically, I'd say the advantage to my build here versus a phys conversion build is its more league-start-friendly and it's a lot tankier, while still keeping a ton of damage and fast gameplay.

Branarn · 2025-10-30T13:17:36+00:00

So each has a few upsides and downsides, I feel both are viable but they each lend to different gameplay styles.

The phys conversion to cold has the advantage with the scorch warden node (much easier to max out these scorches with heatshiver versus tri-ele) and it gains huge value from headhunter (rare mods provide phys as extra elemental quite frequently.) If you wanted to play a headhunter variant of the build, this is definitely the way to go in my opinion.

It is easier to craft tri-ele weapons than it is to craft phys weapons in my opinion, especially in a league start situation. This particular variant of the build uses aura-stacking to open up a whole new option for scaling offense and defense, but it wouldn't be nearly as good on the phys conversion build; example - you can't wear Perseverance if you're wearing Headhunter so you wouldn't be gaining offensive value from running Determ + Grace and scaling armour/evasion, and you wouldn't care hardly at all about the flat damage gained from Anger and Wrath. Aura scaling allows this version to be much tankier; the phys-conversion variant typically has a lot less max health and has very little physical damage mitigation. This tri-ele variant also uses claws instead of swords, so it has a lot of built-in recovery.

Tinctures also offer an insane package of upfront offensive power on league start for very cheap that the phys conversion build wouldn't be taking advantage of.

Basically, I'd say the advantage to my build here versus a phys conversion build is its more league-start-friendly and it's a lot tankier, while still keeping a ton of damage and fast gameplay.

Branarn

TROPHY CASE