Greetings fellow exiles! I’m finally back in Necropolis League with my super tank build. This is one of the most powerful builds in the game and can clear new Tier 17 maps and Uber Bosses with ease. This is Ephemeral Edge Molten Strike Trickster!

In this guide, we’ll focus on the gameplay of this build and how to obtain and upgrade the gear it requires. Let’s get straight to it.

Mechanic Explained

Our skill of choice is Molten Strike. When you hit an enemy, it will spray Rolling Magma, and if you slow down the projectiles, all Magma Orbs can hit the same target.

We scale the projectile count to 5 and start scaling the energy shield. For this reason, we will use Ephemeral Edge with Resolute Technique corruptions. The easiest way to get this is to spend POE Currency to buy non-corrupted ones, then vaal yourself or double corrupt your weapon until you hit this.

Note that it’s not worth the price tag of 10 Divine Orbs or more, as players demand it a lot. It saves money to do it yourself.

Since our main damage type is lightning, we can use Voice of the Storm unique Amulet to get even more damage in this build.

Lightning Damage with Non-Critical Strikes is Lucky, which means that every time we deal damage to an enemy, the game rolls twice and chooses the higher number. This is very useful when your damage range is very high, especially since the damage range of our lightning build is very large compared to other builds.

Precise Technique

Because of Voice of the Storm Amulet, we can’t scale critical hits, so we can use a very interesting Keystone Passive, Precise Technique. If Accuracy Rating is higher than Maximum Life, attack damage is increased by 40% in exchange for us being unable to deal with critical hits. Because we use Chaos Inoculation, our max life is 1, and this Keystone will take effect with zero effort.

Scale Damage By Defense

I really like this build because we can scale damage with layers of defense. Where does the nearly 13k energy shield come from? Let’s start with the biggest source.

Because we selected Trickster, we have access to Escape Artist Ascendancy node. Equipped body armor has +1 maximum energy shield for every 6 Evasion Rating. We need to use a hybrid body armor base to benefit more from it.

In addition, we also need very high evasion and energy shield roll on the body armor. On this build I rolled 2.2k evasion and 490 energy shield. It’s worth noting that this chest armor alone gives us almost 5k of energy shield.

We also stacked Intelligence for more energy shields, reaching over 1.1k, which is pretty impressive.

Curse

We can use 3 curses in this build because using my favorite Anathema unique Ring, our curse limit is equal to our maximum energy cost. Each character can have 3 charges, so our curse limit is 3.

All 3 curses I use include Elemental Weakness, Conductivity and Sniper’s Mark.

Many people are worried that this unique Ring will not work if there is no power charge in the build. But actually, according to the wording of the ring, you don’t need to generate them, so don’t worry about that.

Aspect Of The Crab

Additionally, Aspect of the Crab is also crucial in this build. This will give us Crab Barriers every half second, and each crab stack will reduce physical damage, so this aura alone will reduce physical damage by 20%. But please note that when we are attacked, we will lose all stack.

In Necropolis League, we get level 30 Aspect of the Crab, which adds two extra max stacks, so we’ll get 24% physical damage reduction. I know for some of you it may not be a vast difference, but it’s better than nothing.

To combat the disadvantages of this aura, we will use our very high intelligence to convert the evasion rating with an evasion and energy shield mastery. So we can free up an aura because we won’t be using Grace.

New Tech

Next, I wanted to do something new with this build. As you can see, we use 4 flasks so that we can easily sustain ourselves even during boss fights.

We achieve this via Traitor Keystone, which will provide 4 flask charges every 5 seconds per empty flask slot. Additionally, I’m using Searing Exarch implicit modifiers to generate 1 flask charge every 3 seconds.

We get all the good Flask-related nodes on the passive tree and from now on we have 100% uptime. This is very cool. Because this way we can solve resistance problems and get more damage in the build.

Our key recovery comes from an energy shield leech. Doing this alone isn’t very good, as you’ll stop leeching when you reach full energy shield. But since we chose Trickster as Ascendancy, we can access an interesting node, Soul Drinker.

This allows us to leech the energy shield without the leech effect being eliminated if our energy shield is maxed out. This means that if we can hit the target, we can stay stationary on almost anything.

Elemental Ailment Immunity

For Tier 17 and Uber endgame you need Elemental Ailment Immunity, so we use Ancestral Vision. Additionally, Modifiers to Chance to Suppress Spell Damage also apply to Chance to Avoid Elemental Ailments, for half its value. We also get the remaining avoid% from boots.

Items

Next, let’s move on to the gear you’ll need for this build.

For weapons, we chose Ephemeral Edge. First and most important, attacks with this weapon increase the maximum lightning damage by 20% of the maximum energy shield, while also giving us a large amount of energy shield.

Then there’s Voice of the Storm Amulet. Lightning Damage with Non-Critical Strikes is Lucky. We are also anointing on this Arcane Focus.

The most important thing is Anathema unique Ring. With this ring we can use 3 curses in our build. It also gives us intelligence and a bit of energy shield.

I made most of the other rare items in this build myself, so it’s hard to estimate the cost, but it’s not expensive at all. But in short, you need to quality up all the items around 28% if possible, and get bases with fractured intelligence tier 1 mod.

Flask Setup

Flasks are a very important part of this build, so if you make a mistake here, you’ll end up with worse results than you’ve seen before.

I use Bismuth Flask with increased effect and additional elemental resistance. You can get higher reduction duration when you craft this flask, but be sure to check the uptime of PoB flask as it requires 100% uptime.

Next up is Ruby Flask with reduced charge and crafted to avoid being stunned.

Our damage flask is Silver Flask, which will give us Onslaught. Now I’m using the increased effect on this one, but if you only want to use this build for bossing, then you’ll need the flask charge recovery rate for better uptime.

Finally, don’t forget to use the Taste of Hate unique flask, which will give us a huge damage reduction in physical attacks.

Passive Tree

Finally, I just want to highlight a few things required for this Molten Strike Trickster build in the passive tree.

Through Necropolis League, we got a new unique jewel, which is Perandus Pact. We get 45% energy shield from this jewel.

The most important thing is the flask effect duration. We need 4 so that our flask can have 100% uptime. All that’s left is spell suppression, which I know can be expensive, but is worth the investment.

Since we have Trickster as Ascendancy, Polymath will give us more damage with each mastery allocated.

The most important node is Escape Artist, which is our main defense layer.

Next is Soul Drinker node. This will give us Energy Shield Over-leech, where we can leech from the damage we deal.

The last node is Spellbreaker. This will help us cap our suppression. If we’re in full energy shield mode, we’ll take less damage from spell damage.

Anyway, that’s the end of this guide. I hope you enjoyed this build of Energy Shield stacking Trickster. Good luck!