[Ultimatum] PoE 3.14 Hierophant Fast Archmage Blade Vortex Templar Safe Build

This PoE 3.14 Ultimatum Hierophant Archmage Blade Vortex Templar build is an extremely strong build, balancing both very high tankiness with very high DPS. As a result its a very strong deep delver and boss-killer. It also has huge AoE making it a good map clearer (including 100% delirious ones).

 

Skill Tree

Passive Tree & PoB

Path of Building Link

High-end PoB (lv 100): https://pastebin.com/3pHR0yA0 --> 20.0k hp, 42.1m dps, estimate 200ex
Midway PoB (lv 90): https://pastebin.com/GhBG4etp --> 15.3k hp, 14.6m dps, estimate 60ex
Low-end PoB (lv 85): https://pastebin.com/SWmnBCVp --> 11.6k hp, 5.9m dps, estimate 20ex

Absolute starter PoB (lv 69, earliest that this build works): https://pastebin.com/7aTW3KUH -->
7.1k hp, 1.7m dps, price depends on how far after league start: 6-link Pledge + Indigon + 100 chaos approx

 

Gems Setup

Blade Vortex - Unleash - Archmage - Arcane Surge - Awakened Controlled Destruction - Awakened Lightning Penetration

Vortex - Awakened Unbound Ailments - Culling Strike - Awakened Hextouch - Conductivity - Elemental Weakness

Aura: Precision, Clarity, Wrath

Immortal Call - CWDT - Vaal Righteous Fire - Increased Duration

Wave of Conviction - Blood Magic - Flame Dash - Second Wind

 

Gear Setup

Core Unique

Pledge of Hands, Indigon, Cloak of Defiance, Essence Worm

Rare Items

Amulet - Allocates Thunderous Salvos
+16 to all Attributes
26% increased Spell Damage
37% increased Global Critical Strike Chance
+38% to Global Critical Strike Multiplier
+105 to maximum Life
+87 to maximum Mana
12% increased maximum Mana
+1 to Minimum Frenzy Charges

Usefull mods: Critical Strike Multiplier, Spell Damage, Mana, Life and res, Unnerve chance on gloves

Jewels

Unnatural Instinct and Watcher's Eye with

• #% of Damage taken from Mana before Life while affected by Clarity
• Gain #% of Maximum Mana as Extra Maximum Energy Shield while affected by Clarity

Rare jewels: Critical Strike Multiplier with mana, life

Flask

Phasing and movement flask. Diamond Flask (Critical Strike Chance is Lucky)

Unique: Bottled Faith and Cinderswallow Urn

 

CONCEPTS - DEFENCE

This is a hybrid build utilizing all 3 of Life, Mana and ES in our hp pool.

We have Mind over Matter with 60% effect.

• 30% effect from MoM from Cloak of Defiance
• 10% effect from Cloak of Defiance
• 10% effect from Hierophant ascendancy
• 10% effect from Clarity Watcher's Eye

We have tons of Energy Shield from converting Life and Mana to ES

• 20% of Mana -> ES from Hierophant ascendancy
• 10% of Mana -> ES from Clarity Watcher's Eye
• 20% of Life -> ES from Corrupted Soul (Timeless jewel keystone)

So in the high-end PoB, our hp pool consists of 5629 life + 8444 mana + 5960 es = 20033 total. Corrupted Soul + MoM guarantees that any (non-chaos) damage is distributed among all three pools, allowing us to leech life, regenerate mana, and leech ES all at the same time.

We have 4 minimum endurance charges from the Ascendancy. We have decent spell block and small attack block chance from Pledge of Hands, and the tree. We can get a small amount of dodge and spell dodge chance from our boots and pantheon.

We have naturally high mana regen from having high total mana. Life leech is something that we have to invest in: either Anomalous Blade Vortex gem, Doryani's Lesson cluster jewel, Vitality watcher's eye, or Incursion jewellery with lightning leeched as life.

Our big HP pool allows us to use a lv 20 CWDT with lv 20 Immortal Call, which lasts almost 3 seconds due to our investment in skill duration.

If you prefer running a life flask for emergencies, run a mana flask instead. Since with Indigon, Mana flasks get more than double the value (mana recovery + life recovery + burst life heal).

 

CONCEPTS - OFFENCE

Our damage comes almost entirely from Archmage Support with the help of Indigon. If you're not familiar with Archmage or Indigon I encourage reading the descriptions for those two carefully. One crucial aspect of Archmage is that the damage it provides updates dynamically depending on your current manacost, rather than what you actually spent the last time you cast the spell.

We have Blade Vortex linked to Unleash (with Thunderous Salvos on tree for +1 seals), and also supported by Greater Spell Echo (GSE) from Pledge of Hands. This means when we cast BV once, we get 7 stacks of blades: 1 stack from the cast, 4 from unleash seals (these take no animation time), and 2 from GSE (these do take normal cast animation time x2). For the purposes of this build, we will not be using the last 2 casts from GSE. To do this, simply left click anywhere to move just after casting BV, this will animation cancel the 2 casts from GSE and prevent us from being self-stunned for about a second. So we get 5 stacks of blades every time we cast BV.

The manacost for one BV cast is 1800 (in the high-end version). So upon casting BV once, this procs Indigon giving us 9 Indigon stacks, which raises our manacost temporarily to 9.4k, just under our total unreserved mana of 9.5k, for the next 4 seconds. This 9.4k manacost makes Archmage give massive amounts of flat added lightning damage to our BV blades. We wait 4 seconds for Indigon's effect to wear off, the manacost drops back to 1800 and we immediately recast BV again. We repeat this process throughout the entire map or boss or delve encounter. Each of our BV stacks last 8.25 secs due to the duration clusters we take on the tree, which just about covers two Indigon cycles of 4 secs each. Since we get 5 BV stacks each cast, we should almost always be at the cap of 10 BV stacks.

So, to achieve maximum damage, we need to recast BV precisely X seconds after the last cast, where 4.00 < X < 4.25 .

Failure case 1: If X < 4.00, this means Indigon's effect from the last cast hasnt worn off. So you end up spending the 9.4k manacost, Indigon gets 47 stacks and your manacost zooms to 44k. This causes Archmage to stop working since it only works when manacost < total unreserved mana. This means you do basically zero damage for the next 4 seconds.

Failure case 2: If X > 4.25, this means our BV stacks from the previous cast will expire before the current Indigon cycle is over. So we will drop to 5 BV stacks instead of 10 for some amount of time, depending on how large X is. At 5 BV stacks we do about 35% of the dmg at 10 stacks. Its not good but its nowhere near as bad as Failure case 1. Eg. if you recast 0.50 sec too late, you still only lose out on 0.50 secs of dmg uptime, but if you recast even 0.01 sec too early, you lost out on 4 secs of dmg uptime. So always err on the side of recasting BV too late rather than too early.

Besides scaling mana for our Archmage - Indigon combo:

• We heavily scale crit chance and crit multiplier
• Reduce enemy resistances and penetration, including wave of conviction and conductivity + elemental weakness curses
• Increase damage taken by enemy: big shocks, unnerve, bottled faith, and cinderswallow urn

The Hierophant ascendancy also provides 100% increased area of effect. With the help of a few more sources of AoE we achieve a large BV radius of 30 units (36 units if using Echo Abuse). The in-game BV animation unfortunately doesnt represent the real radius accurately. If your BV radius is 33 or higher it will show the outermost blade at 33 radius. If your BV radius is between 28 and 32, it will show the outermost blade at 28 radius.

 

LEVELLING

The minimum needed items for this build are: 6-linked Pledge of Hands, Indigon, Cloak of Defiance, Atziri's Foible and Essence Worm

League start viability: Pledge and Indigon are not available on day 1 of the league, so this cannot be a day 1 league starter. Indigon and Pledge both fall sharply in price over the first week of the league. So once you obtain enough currency to get these two, 6-link your Pledge, and about 100 chaos extra for the other pieces, you can start levelling this build.

I strongly advise not to attempt this build with a 5-link Pledge. While other builds only lose 30-40% dmg from one missing support, this build loses out in three ways: less dmg from missing support, less dmg due to less manacost, and less dmg due to less Indigon stacks.

The earliest that you can equip all the unique gear pieces is lv 69. So before that you need to level with a different build, and once you hit 69 you can do one big respec of tree and gear. PoB for a very basic lv 69 starter: https://pastebin.com/7aTW3KUH. The starter is strong enough to carry you into red maps without having to do any gear upgrades.

Before lv 69, theres isn't any one correct way to level a Templar/Hierophant. Any generic caster levelling build is fine, but if you do choose an archmage/MoM build, you will end up saving a ton on Regrets later. Some basic recommendations: selfcast Arc, selfcast Ball Lightning, Storm Brand (all of the above can be combo-ed with Orb of Storms, and can use Archmage), selfcast Purifying Flame, Arc totems, Freezing Pulse totems, Holy Flame totems.

 

INITIAL MANA COST

The damage for our build depends very crucially on our pre-Indigon BV mana cost. The way Indigon works, at every multiple of 200 we get a big damage boost due to one more Indigon stack. The ideal endgame breakpoint to hit is 1800 manacost. With 1800 mana spent recently, the math works out so that the post-Indigon manacost rises to 97-99% of your total unreserved mana, which is what we want (remember to divine your Indigon to 60%). We do not ever want to hit the 2000 mana breakpoint since that will very likely put the post-Indigon manacost over our total unreserved mana, and this will cause archmage to stop working.

To hit 1800 manacost, you need roughly 9625 unreserved mana (or 9690 total mana, assuming lv 1 clarity and precision). While you are gearing up you will likely have lower total mana, and will only hit the 1200 or 1400 or 1600 breakpoint instead. This is fine, your damage will be lower but the build still works. But prioritize hitting the next breakpoint if close to it.

Make sure to link all your side skills (Flame Dash, Wave of Conviction etc.) to Blood Magic so that they do not interfere with the Indigon balance, apart from the one exception mentioned below (Vortex, with caveats). This also means using Arcane Cloak in this build is an absolute no-go even though we have so much mana.

What if despite your best efforts you are sitting at a pre-Indigon manacost of say 1720? Read below for how to fudge it to 1800 with the help of Vortex.

VORTEX - USES AND CAVEATS

Vortex is a very handy way to Chill, Curse and Cull enemies. Since we can put Vortex on our left click it will be automatically casted on cooldown as you click to move. The Curse and Cull are on hit, and only relevant for bosses and tanky rares in deep delve, since everything else dies too quickly. The chill however is pretty useful, especially for delve nodes where we can cover the entire node in chilled ground thanks to our enormous AoE. Theres two cases to consider here.

1. Vortex linked to Blood Magic. This is the simplest option. Assuming Wave of Conviction, Flame Dash etc. are also linked to Blood Magic, this ensures that no other side skills interfere with the Indigon balance. In this case you should level your vortex to 20 (or 21) for lower cooldown.

2. Vortex not linked to Blood Magic. This not only frees up a gem link, but allows us to pad our 'mana spent recently' to the next higher Indigon breakpoint that you could not reach with BV alone. But this imposes two restrictions on the maximum mana you can spend on Vortex.

• Total mana spent on Vortex alone (post-Indigon) in any 4 sec period, should be less than 200
• Total mana spent on Vortex (post-Indigon) in any 4 sec period, plus BV manacost (pre-Indigon), should be less than 2000

If you fail either of the two above conditions you'll find that sometimes your post-Indigon BV manacost goes above your total mana, and you do zero damage. Fortunately since Vortex has a built-in cooldown, this is easy to ensure. For most cases a lv 12 Vortex is safe, but may have to be lower if you have high multiplier support gems linked to it. If your post-Indigon Vortex manacost is 67 or higher, keep downlevelling Vortex until it isnt. Also, if you usually hold down left click to move and thus proc Vortex exactly on cooldown, your Vortex needs to lvl 9 or below.

Example support gems include: Power charge on crit (for power charge generation against solo bosses, ie. Sirus/Aul), Awakened Unbound Ailments (more chill effect), Bonechill (even more chill effect), Blind (useless vs Sirus, ok vs Aul but unreliable), Arcane Surge (for an alternate version of the build, frees up a slot in our BV 6-link for Awakened Inc AoE / Conc Effect).

UPGRADE ORDER

This is a rough priority order in which to get the more expensive upgrades for this build. This order is not set in stone, feel free to deviate from it.

• Glorious Vanity with Corrupted Soul
• MoM effect Watcher's Eye (divining to 10% effect is crucial)
• Unnatural Instinct
• Fertile Catalyst all your jewellery
• Awakened Hextouch Support (note that its useless before it hits lvl 5)
• Bottled Faith
• Awakened Controlled Destruction and Awakened Lightning Penetration
• Cluster Jewel setup (reminder to get flat added fire dmg for Cremator, read FAQ 3 - Ignite)
• Elder/Hunter Stygian Vise with T1 % max life mod
• Indigon with a BV enchantment
• Double mod Watcher's Eye
• Rare amulet to replace Atziri's Foible (will also need Dex rebalancing)
• Unnerve Gloves
• Glorious Vanity divining (for good mods on small passives and possibly a nearby notable).
• Gem corruptions where applicable
• Cloak of Defiance double corruption
• Wise Oak resist rebalancing
• Triple mod Watcher's Eye

Meanwhile in parallel, you should also continually try to get more mana and more life on gear and tree, and more crit multi on jewels. Especially prioritize life over mana, unless you're very close to the next Indigon breakpoint. With 60% MoM, for every 100 life points you gain, you add 250 points to your EHP pool.

 

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