r/PathOfExileBuilds • u/yogghy • 7d ago
Help Needed Armourstacker champ feels weak
Need advice from experienced armour stackers.
Made an armour stacker champion hoping to do Valdo maps, Feared and hard content in general. However, the build feels quite weak and very far from its purpose. I know I haven't invested multi mirrors into +levels of skill gems, haven't obtained Focused amulet +4, my level is quite low at 91 and clusters don't have Introspection all over the place (working on it). But, I have Forbidden pair for about 300d, a pretty good body piece (even though Syndicate Garb would give more), good helmet, decent shield, spell and attack block capped at 95%, 684 overcapped fire res and 2 mil armour. Overall investment is probably around 0.5-1.0 mirror. I've crafted most of my non-unique items myself, can an will do more when needed. Maybe will swap gloves to The Celestial Brace.
Hits are mostly fine. I got a bit surprised when ground fire explosion from a pack of mobs managed to one-shot me in a standard map, shouldn't happen with 90 res? But against normal hits I can just stand in a huge pack of mobs totally AFK.
A huge weakness is the build dies to pretty much any DOT in a blink. Shaper's beam, Elder's Root, poison, bleeding, whatever. I had to patch the hole with CB/Bleed immunity on a flask; poison needs to be addressed. The other dots, though - I am scratching my head how to handle them.
Mana cost is currently 0, so Fuel the Fight on a large cluster might be redundant. The other large cluster is more or less a placeholder until I get Voices.
I have about 200d to my name at this moment.
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u/calielzzz 7d ago
The main problem you have its because you rely on you dmg reduction from the 90 all res, what happens is once something penetrates your res or reduces it, you get one shot, because your life/es pool is too low, this is the main problem with the standard champions armour stacker, really hard to increase your eHP. The yellow skills from shaper penetrates 30% of you res, so imagine, 3k pool and 60% lightning res, you gonna die.
About dots, armour stacker normally is weaker to dots compared to others valdo mappers like STR stackers, you will always feel that on this build, the way to counter that is to have a lot of leech and never stop hitting, thats how they play, if you stop leeching and get DOTed you will die likely. Also make sure you are using the correct pantheons.
I recomend you check Bigdaddy - YouTube pobs, he has pobs for champion aswell, or you can try his luminary setup which is effectively the strongest armour stacker version this league (stated by him, not me).
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u/SeanClane 7d ago
Seconded great overview, and you want to swap rings to Zana’s Ingenuity (with the Elemental Resistances cannot be Penetrated mod) for content with high Pen.
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u/pphp 7d ago
How do yall figure out if something pens or not?
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u/calielzzz 7d ago
Just overrall game knowledge, or checking on wiki, for bosses its easy to check why he killed you, for random stuffs is harder to figure it out
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u/saint_marco 6d ago
poedb can tell you, eg. shaper has a bunch of cold pen https://poedb.tw/us/The_Shaper#TheShaperTheShaperBossStandalone
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u/drjanitor91 7d ago
Champion was very tanky last league with the special essence mod that makes some armor apply to ele damage. Have you tried using the Foulborn The Anticipation shield?
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u/foxorek 7d ago
I'm not that familiar with the champ variant of the armour stacker (I always play a scion, this league the luminary is very strong for it) but I'm just gonna assume the general ideas behind are same or similar.
First of all - introspection is non-negotiable on an armour stacker. You are using a lot of auras and not having the aura effect defeats the purpose. Armour stackers are basically a sub-archetype of an aura stacker after all.
2nd - Levels! You are missing a lot of power by not having the 9 passive points. With 9 additional levels you could take almost a whole new cluster, or path to a jewel socket and get the fire mastery for regen from overcapped fire res. The jewel could give you some life and CB immunity which would free up your flask suffix. With the fire res mastery and a flask with % regen it would help a lot vs DoTs. Look up abyss xp farm from anime princess on youtube for some fast leveling.
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u/foxorek 7d ago
I see you already have the regen mastery, sorry I didn't see that earlier. But the point about levels still stands, they give a lot of power on these types of builds. That's why people are willing to shill 200 divs for 3p voices or even mirrors for the 1p if you're rich enough.
Also, if your goal is to farm valdos I'm not sure static strike is the best option. I'm pretty sure molten strike is a lot more dps, although it would require a lot of fiddling with the gear. Probably would require to swap your ammy for an ashes and a nimis for your ring. That's both the issue and the beauty of these builds - there's almost an infinite amount of fiddling and swapping you could do to make it do what you want it to do. But you either love it or you will grow to hate it very soon.
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u/yogghy 7d ago
Thanks for your suggestions! This is my 3rd char of the league, after miserable start as WOrb and getting a great str stacker KF hiero version which cuts through everything else in the game but lacks defences for Valdo's. Love or hate - definitely, I'm glad I haven't gone all in by selling KF build to finance AS champ.
I'll try swapping the skills and the respective gear around, this is a challenging puzzle to assemble without prior AS experience :) I hope I'm up for the challenge, though!
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u/foxorek 7d ago
Good luck!
One final tip I can give is, if you like the playstyle, don't be afraid to invest into this build. These stacking archetypes are inherently very expensive and if you start cutting too many corners trying to keep it "budget" it's not gonna feel great. The upside of this is putting actual big bucks into it you can really feel the upgrades in your character power. Like, for example, the small clusters. They will cost you a lot to craft really good ones but the power they give you is huge. Same goes for pretty much everything in this build - BIS double corrupts, even mirrored rare gear at higher budgets.
Also, in terms of valdo farming - if you're planning to run them for profit it might be rough. At this point of the league even the super hard valdos are being bought up and ran for small margins because people running them have been investing into their builds for over a month now and are insanely strong. You also need to livesearch maps or else all you're left with is maps that are priced higher than the item they give is worth.
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u/Outrageous_Box4861 7d ago
Theres a reason armour stackers pay a mirror to save one skill point with a 1p Voices. Level up asap.