Molten Strike Pathinder Build Guide (PoE Necropolis 3.24)

Introduction

Due to the latest balancing changes, we do not recommend playing this build anymore, as it does not meet the high standards we apply to our guides in terms of fun and performance. We are leaving it up as a reference and it might be revived in a later patch.

They killed Phys taken as rare mods. They killed Taste of Hate taken as. They nerfed ED to the ground. PHD shield backup build was also bricked through Vaal Pact. In short, the build is on hiatus until I can find a workaround. Hopefully, I will.

This build is inspired heavily by the work Kunagi put into his Molten Strike Pathfinder in 3.22. A few things have changed due to Wildwood, and a few things have changed due to our preferences, but the original idea is his and his work has heavily influenced where this ended up.

This is the closest I have gotten to that plant my feet Molten Strike feeling of old in a long time. Poison builds are very strong these days, and molten strike really synergises with poison due to the sheer projectile vomiting the skill is capable of.

Necropolis updates: With the removal of Wildwood and Tinctures (RIP Sweet Prince), we are once again forced into a Pneumatic Dagger. Do not attempt to play the build without this dagger.
This league also introduced The Perandus Pact, This baby grants us a whopping 80% chaos resistance and alleviates so much suffix pressure. Do not skimp on this, get a perandus pact with +4 chaos resistance it is truly bonkers.

Build Overview

A brief overview of the build’s strengths, and its failings. This is to help you quickly assess whether this is for you, or not.

Pros

+ Bosser This build scales to kill pretty much anything. It’s also tanky enough to permit you to make a few mistakes.

+ Laid Back This build has a pretty laid back playstyle and does not require five hundred button presses.

Cons

– Visual Clarity There are balls everywhere. You will not see the ground around or beneath your character. This makes ground effects more dangerous.

– Damage is Capped Due to being poison, we are capped at 35 million damage. We also have pretty mediocre damage early on, but as we invest more we will eventually reach this cap.

Playstyle

The playstyle of this build is exceedingly simple. You whirl blades through the map, you dive into packs, you molten strike and the pack explodes. Rinse and repeat.
On single targets, you wack them with your dagger, throw balls everywhere and move out of the most telegraphed attacks. But to a pretty shocking extent, you can simply plant your feet and poison things to death. Occasionally you refresh your curses if the target lives.

Damage Scaling and Defensive Layers

Damage scaling wise things are not so complicated. We make use of a Pneumatic Dagger to permit any and all damage to poison. We then get high elemental damage modifiers on our dagger, our helmet nd scale DoT damage to get more poison damage.
Attack speed nearly exponentially scales the previously mentioned values, and things get poisoned to high heaven.

I will attempt to keep this explanation as brief as I can.
The build utilises a number of various layers that interact in ways that are not always obvious, and seemingly break some of PoE’s core defensive rules (we reduce our own maximum elemental resistances, for instance).
First of all, we are a Transcendance build. This means we cut our maximum elemental resistances by -15, but our Armour now applies to our elemental damage taken.
Secondly, we make use of Eternal Damnation, to further reduce our maximum elemental resistances by -5. The upside here is that half of our chaos resistance will apply to elemental damage taken in addition to its normal effects.
To round this out, we convert 100% of the physical damage we take into elemental damage. So all physical damage is checked against elemental damage instead. Elemental damage is checked against our resistances, our armour and half of our chaos resistance. This is a bit convoluted, but overall the defensive package here is really, really strong.

PoB

You can find the builds PoB here: https://pobb.in/JgKBftUyjCVz

Please do read the other pages of this guide, as there are quite a few things to consider for most items in it.