Hello everyone and welcome to Affliction League. Let me show you my league starter build. My league started off successfully. I completed Act 10 with ease, reaching red maps with high movement speed, defense, and damage.
Lab runners and hardcore players inspire this build. This Pathfinder build, also known as Mageblood without Mageblood build, makes it easy to farm Heists, Labyrinths, and various maps in a flash.
The downside is that this build isn’t designed for serious combat like Ultimatum or Ritual. While we can easily eliminate Toxic Rain, most players mistakenly believe that Toxic Rain is a poisonous build. Not all chaos skills deal poison damage, but all poison skills are chaos skills.
If you want to impose poison damage into any attack-based build, you’ll need uniform physical damage or chaos damage, and a 100% poison chance in the build settings. And you need to have at least a 90% hit chance for the poison to work on them. This also means that this build requires more POE Currency investment.
Their default version doesn’t scale with poison damage, nor does it require hit rate or accuracy. The arrows fired by Toxic Rain will leave Spore Pods on the ground, which will explode and have a certain area of effect.
In addition to this, it will also attach vines to its victims, much like Ensnaring Arrow, incapacitating them much like Hinder and Maim.
Overlapping Pods
The amount of damage caused by overlapping Pods and Wither effects is very high. This build uses Carcass Jack and Bow Mastery’s Area of Effect to get at least 4 overlapping explosions from Pods.
The single shot of a volley fired by my character overlapped at least 4 times when it exploded. And the maximum limit in POB is determined by the maximum number of projectiles per shot. By firing multiple shots, these explosions can stack like poison, with each explosion causing increasing damage to a single target.
So the best way to measure this is skill effect duration, attack speed and area of effect.
Wither Stacking
As with any chaos build, stacking Wither and its effects are considered the best source of damage scaling.
The downside to Wither is that it doesn’t last very long, so you’ll need a support skill that stacks significantly and sustains Wither.
By default, Pathfinder has an Ascendancy point that increases the effect, giving a 25% chance of inflicting Wither on hit. This also applies to our totems. The default number is 3, each using Withering Touch Support and the new Toxic Rain of Withering skill.
This setup easily achieved consistent 15 stacks of Wither on our single target. To get started quickly, we also use Withering Step skill, which causes 6 Wither debuffs.
Passive Tree
First, we have 2 separate passive tree and gear sets. So, make sure to switch between the two individually to suit your budget.
We are using two important Chaos Masteries that most build makers forget about.
First, this node’s damage to enemies with Energy Shield is increased by 10%. Since most of the rare monsters in Path of Exile have Energy Shield, this is a huge damage multiplier from the early stages of the game.
The second most important Mastery is to have a 5% chance of inflicting the maximum number of Withers since we have multiple sources applying Wither on every hit.
These two Masteries stood out to me when I was testing this build at the start of the league.
Another important part of the build is increasing skill effect duration. This is another dominant source of damage scaling. The longer Pods last, the more chaos damage is inflicted on the target. We have an Efficacy Support and more Duration Mastery to scale this.
The third important part of the build is flask effect and uptime. You can get slight buffs from small nodes in the passive tree. If you don’t get the permanent uptime of flask effect after the final Uber lab, you need to check your belt section and passive skill tree.
Alchemist’s Genius is a powerful buff, especially in Pathfinder. You can easily roll it by using Orb of Alteration on Medium Cluster Jewel.
For our endgame setup, we used Brutal Restraint Timeless Jewel, which brings some nice bonuses to our build. You can also use this type of Timeless Jewel if you want to stack the one that moves faster.
For low POE Currency budget settings, have mod-like items that perform well even on higher difficulties.
Gear Setup
As discussed earlier, Carcass Jack helps your Toxic Rain explode all overlapping pods in one salvo. Just make sure to toggle them all with the right settings to fit your budget.
In an endgame setting, Devouring Diadem allows you to use Malevolence or Haste as an extra aura with Divine Blessing Support. This will also solve your mana problem.
Importance Of Flasks
Pathfinder build relies heavily on flasks. Hardcore players will use a Prismatic Flask and a Quicksilver Flask. I would recommend this setup if your focus is on getting more defense.
But for Softcore players who want a fast farming strategy, movement speed and action speed are the major concerns. For this purpose, I highly recommend Silver Flask with its enhanced effects and movement speed, as well as Quartz Flask and Quicksilver Flask.
Quartz Flask not only limits your chances of suppressing spell damage, but it also allows you to move through enemies without getting stuck.
Wildwood Ascendancy
Early on, your best bet is Warden’s Oath of the Maji. This requires that your boots contain no gems to take advantage of the 30% massive movement speed.
Wildwood Blessing is absolutely perfect for hybrid evasion/armour builds and is very similar to Crab Barrier. The downside is that Barkskin skill is an aura, requires 20% of the mana reserve, and does not stack with our passive tree buffs for the aura effect. You need a Level 3 Enlighten Support to activate this feature.
Lesson of the Seasons synergies well with our Lethe Shade, as this helps mitigate the disadvantages of your longer duration of ailments.
Finally, Detect Evil can help you find map bosses, especially if you’re farming Maven’s Invitation and special maps. If you get a powerful set of charms that benefit this build, switch to Wildwood Primalist.
Movement Speed (Summary)
With all the details explained, let’s summarize how we get 300% base movement speed. This mainly comes from our Flask setup and our passive tree, which also contains the Brutal Restraint Timeless Jewel.
In the low-budget version, we replaced Warden’s Oath of the Maji with a Brutal Restraint. Make sure your build has all 3 of these as well as Flask effect node for Pathfinder build.
