Dear Exiles, today I will bring you one of the most satisfying tank builds I have ever played in POE 3.24, which is Detonate Dead of Chain Reaction Pathfinder. Its damage, tankiness, and recovery capabilities are all staggering. In this guide, you’ll learn how builds work, and how to upgrade and craft them. Without further ado, let’s get started!
Main Skill
Our skill of choice is Detonate Dead of Chain Reaction. It targets a corpse and causes it to explode, which deals a percentage of the corpse’s health as fire damage. This will then continue to target other corpses in the area until either it runs out of corpses or 8 corpses are destroyed. Therefore, we will use very high life specters in our Desecrate corpse pool.
Specters
In the new Tier 17 map, we get new spectrums with a very high life percentage. Now Disruptor I’m using has 440% more life, Molten Soul has 420% more life, and Senior Scientist has 420% more life.
You will use these 3 specters, but by default you can only have 2. So we will use Voideye unique ring and socket a level 20 Raise Specter gem.
To target corpses, you need to hold “A” on your keyboard. This will bring up the corpse life bar and search for the specters I mentioned before, and use Raise Specter until you have 3. You can then remove the gems as the game will remember the specters you saved in the pool.
That’s why we need high-life corpses, because we add poison to the mix. The higher the life of specters, the higher the base damage. It’s that simple.
How To Convert Fire Damage?
By default, fire damage does not cause poison. But there is a unique glove that allows us to deal poison damage with fire damage, and that’s Volkuur’s Guidance.
Sadly, you need to get a corrupted one with Temporal Chains on hit. Otherwise, the build will be very clunky and your damage will be much worse than what you see here.
Detonate Dead & Desecrate
Although we cannot cast these two spells, Detonate Dead and Desecrate, at the same time, we will use Arcanist Brand and link to Desecrate. This way your Desecrate will be triggered often and you just need to hold Detonate Dead and wait for the boss’s health to disappear.
You’ll build up a lot of cast speed because the faster you cast, the more Desecrate you have and the more Detonate Dead you have. This is why we chose Pathfinder, because of its ability to maintain cast speed with Silver Flask.
How To Achieve 100% Chance Of Poisoning?
Since this is a poison build, we need to achieve a 100% poison chance.
First, we did 20% with Herald of Agony, another 20% with the glove itself, 25% from the node on the passive tree, Toxic Strikes, and the rest from the tattoo. With all this, we have a 100% chance of being poisoned.
However, our biggest and best multiplier actually comes from the second source. We're going to inflict Wither on the boss, which will increase Chaos damage by 90% by default. In addition, we also get an Ascendancy node, which will increase the Wither effect and give us the opportunity to cause a Wither.
Defense
On the defensive side, we can convert 100% of physical damage into elemental damage. Of that, 50% comes from using Lightning Coil alone, 27% comes from Taste of Hate, 14% comes from our helmet, and we also use Watcher’s Eye so that 10% of physical damage is treated as lightning damage.
Finally, I could use the newest unique belt added to the game, Tides of Time. Thanks to this belt we have 4.2k health regen, so when we take damage we can replenish ourselves immediately.
If you don’t have enough POE Currency budget to buy this unique, we can also easily use Petrified Blood, which allows us to restore more than 50% of life without Life Flasks.
Clear Setup
If all you want is mapping, this build will be a pain to play with. So I need to come up with a suitable solution that’s easy to do but does enough damage to clear.
So its clear setup is Cast while Channelling Support, Detonate Dead and Desecrate, and its trigger skill is Cyclone. This setup is very nice and comfortable to run.
Not only that, but this build also has enough damage to deal with map bosses and elite monsters. Even the garbage monsters on T17 map are not a problem. You just need to rotate until you complete the map.
Items
Next, let’s give a brief overview of some items needed for this build.
- Scepter: Woe Roar
- Helmet: Oblivion Veil
- Shield: Spirit Bulwark
- Body Armor: Lightning Coil
- Talisman: Sorrow Torc
- Rings: Maelstrom Spiral & Bramble Circle
- Boots: Hate Road
- Belt: Tides of Time
- Gloves: Volkuur’s Guidance
Passive Tree
Finally, let’s highlight some things needed to build on a passive tree.
We took Pathfinder as Ascendancy and adopted Nature’s Reprisal, a node that was a game changer in the early going.
Additionally, we have Nature’s Adrenaline to generate more Flask Charges. And Master Toxicist is a pretty big multiplier for this poison build. Finally, there is Master Surgeon. With this, you can activate your Life Flask even if your life is full.
Anyway, that’s the end of this guide. I hope you enjoyed this guide on Detonate Dead of Chain Reaction Pathfinder. See you next time.
