PoE 3.12 Champion Earthshatter Duelist Tank Build - Get Your Flashback Event Prizes

This PoE 3.12 Heist Champion Earthshatter Tank Build build is easy to start and SSF available. Good defenses allows you to easily complete the leveling and get the Flashback prize you want.

Quick Jump

Pros & Cons

Skill Tree

Ascendancy

Master of Metal -> Unstoppable Hero -> Fortitude -> First to strike, Last to Fall

Pantheon: Soul of Solaris and Soul of Shakari

Bandit: Kill All

Passive Tree & PoB

Path of Building Link:

Basic Sample: https://pastebin.com/BXyxE83S

Leveling:

Here, you go for the War Cry nodes to make leveling easier.

Version of the tree if you want to focus on damage.

Version of the tree if you want to go tanky mode.

From here on out, you just fill out life and damage nodes, as well as getting fortify nodes after after or just before Merciless Lab. Just make sure to get the fortify nodes after getting Merc lab, or just use it Fortify until then.

Gems Setup

Main Attack

4L (Early Game): Earthshatter - Impale - Fist of War - Melee Phys

5L (Mid Game): Add Brutality

6L (End Game): Add Close Combat or Pulverise depending on your preference/weapon. You can also play with Melee Damage on Full Life if you have manage to get some overleech.

Auras

Pride

Flesh and Stone - Maim

You can squeeze Vitality here if you want, but I rather have more mana for mobility and War Cry's.

War Cry's

Enduring Cry - Seismic Cry - Intimidating Cry - Second Wind

For last, you can choose your Mobility Skill (Leap Slam, Dash or Flame Dash). If you go for Leap Slam, make sure to get Combat Control on the Skill Tree, and attach Enduring Charge on Melee Stun or Rage for some quality of life improvement.

Defense

Molten Shell / Vaal Molten Shell - Increased Duration

Alternate Quality Gems

Anonamlous Fist of War

• Support Skills have 20% reduced attack speed.
• Support Skills deals 60% increased damage.
• According to POB, this gem can boost your damage by about 11%.

Pulverise

• Supported skills have 10% less attack speed
• Support skills have 20% more melee area damage.

According to POB, this gem can boost your damage by about 13%.

Pride

• Nearby enemies have -5% Physical Damage Reduction.

Could not check damage with POB, but basically it's free damage compared with the default version.

You can have some more quality of life changes on other gems like your, Second Wind, Molten Shell, but it's not that important, just helps a little bit more.

The Phantasmal version of Seismic Cry and Intimidating Cry seems like a decent boost of damage as well, and I don't think the 10% recovery speed will be missed that much.

You can also set up some Cast When Damage Taken, with Immortal Call or Curse.

The rest is up to you really.

Annoints

According to POB, Deep Breaths and Tenacity gives you the most damage. But I think Deep Breaths is calculated kinda weird. Since Oils is hard to get on SSF, there is alot of options here. I'm using Wrecking Ball because I enjoy AS while bossing, but it kinda messes up the Fist of War Gem. As a cheap option, you can for Bone Breaker.

Gear Setup

Basic Gear Sample: Life, Resist and some flat damage

Two Handed Mace

Physical Damage: 315-486
Critical Strike Chance: 5.00%
Attacks per Second: 1.35

20% increased Area of Effect
140% increased Physical Damage
Adds 30 to 51 Physical Damage
+2 Life gained for each Enemy hit by Attacks
+97 to Accuracy Rating
12% increased Attack Speed

You don't have to use the Silver Flask, because it's not very good with Fist of War, but I use so I can combo (Seismic and Intimidating Cry) red boss maps without standing still too much.
There's still a lot of min-maxing you can do (with Influenced Gear for example).

Endgame Choice

Gloves should be with Vulnerability, Temp Chains / Enfeeble are fine.

Helm can also be: Abyssus, Starkonja's Head, enchantments - reduced Earthquake Duration

Facebreaker

+30% to Global Critical Strike Multiplier
10% reduced Enemy Stun Threshold
756% more Physical Damage with Unarmed Attacks
Extra gore

Facebreakers is a really good option, since you'll have ALOT of flat damage with Master of Metal. You don't even need much more flat dmg on gear to outscale a very good pDPS weapon. And, you can use a shield for even more defense.

Leveling

Early Game: You get Earthshatter in The Siren's Cadence quest, until then you can level with anything. Get any 2-handed that has the most damage. We go for the War Cry nodes pretty early on the three, so the leveling process is easier. Make sure you have Seismic Cry, Enduring Cry and Intimidating Cry so you can always proc the Earthshatter.

Mid Game: At this point, it's imporant to start crafting some 2-Handers to speed up the leveling process, as well as getting life nodes. Essesnces and some Heists will help you alot if you are stuck with bad gear. By this time, you'll be getting Resolute Technique and some Impale Nodes, wich will cover all your damage issues. Work on your survivability to smooth the process.

End Game: When you start getting to maps, it's time to start geting some 5L (pretty use when doing Heists) and some 500 pDPS weapon so you can start grinding the Atlas with no problemas. Just go for resist and life on your gear, don't look for flat damage and stuff like that, your weapon and war cry's will take care of the damage for you. At this point, you can start getting the fortify nodes on three (after Merciless Lab) or branching out on different paths if you get some gear you want to optimize around.

Atlas Progression

This is the longest part and where most of people get stuck. I could say some very specific and advanced strategies to progress on Atlas fast, but since I'm focusing this guide to be beginner friendly, I won't do that. So, lets start with some general tips:

• Always try to run your White Maps, Magic
• Always try to run your Yellow Maps, Rare
• Always try to run your Red Maps, Cartographer's Chisel and Rare

Note About Red Maps: When you're starting to farm them, try also to add Vaal Fragments, Scarab's, Master's Mission, and some Map Mods (wich is free for the first time you use them). I don't recommend vaaling red maps early on, since it could brick then by rolling some mod the build can't do.

• Always check Zana before/after doing Conquerors to get your uncompleted Maps.
• Do Higher Tier Maps Recipe (Selling 3 of the Same Map to a vendor)
• Abuse Zana Mission's, to get more Uncompleted Maps.
• Move your Watchstone's from the Atlas from time to time to optimize your Conquerors spawning.
• Check where you've already got most of Watchstones to also change their place.
• Pay attention when get to Awakener level 3, since you'll probabily spawn Awakener soon and won't be able to fight the Conquerors again for a time.
• Build a decent pool of maps before when Jumping from White to Yellow, and Yellow to Red Maps. This is better if you want consistency.
• Just map "4Head". Sometimes it takes a while to progress, and you just have to map for some hours to build a pool of maps.

General mods to avoid early on on red maps:

• Extra damage as elemental
  
• Extra proj
  
• Turbo
  
• Monster Damage
  
• Twinned Bosses
  
• Vulnerability Curse
  

You can run these mods later, but at the beggining, I tend to avoid them so I don't die on maps, loosing valuable XP.

Mods to avoid:

Phys Reflect
No regen (very annoying)

Those were the only 2 mods I didn't really do.

For now, this is it. I plan to add more to this part later.