TbXie's Storm Brand Hierophant Build Guide (PoE Necropolis 3.24)

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.

Affliction & Transfig Gems

The new Storm Brad of Incdecision seems super strong & interesting. I would definitely recommend trying it out!

Introduction

Because Storm Brand is such a fun mapper, and I am totally in love with my newly found minimum charge stacking, I tested a few skills with this archetype of build. Funnily enough, Storm Brand came out as the strongest option for all of them. Therefore, this is yet another fun mapping guide provided by me which stays relatively budgetty. If you want to take on harder content, such as Maven, you will need to invest very hard into a skill like Storm Brand, as you will just struggle finding enough damage to keep fights reasonably short. The archetype of brands however does lend itself towards a lengthy fight as you’re free to dodge so while it’s not impossible, I would not recommend this build to focus on bossing. If you want to blast through maps on a feel good skill however, this might be the one for you.

Disclaimer

Because of the changes to Grand Spectrums, it is very hard to quantify a budget for this build. Therefore, we suggest you only play this when you know you can afford the cornerstone pieces of the build. You can take a look at Firestorm Inquisitor, if you’re looking for a build that can transition into this once you’ve acquired enough currency.

Build Summary

Video Showcase

Coming soon

Pros and Cons

Pros

+ Storm Brand remains one of the best feel-good skills in the game
+ The clearspeed on the build is relatively high and extremely high for its budget
+ Doesn’t require very many hard to obtain pieces as it runs a lot of uniques

Cons

– The required uniques are not always cheap though
– Therefore this build cannot be played on leaguestart

Map Modifiers to be Avoided

You should definitely avoid No Regeneration and possibly reduced recovery rate for Energy Shield as those will gimp both your ability to survive & recover your healthpool. Other than that, Elemental Reflect is obviously impossible.

Playstyle, Mechanics & Strengths

Because this is a brand build, you will almost never have to care about “doing damage” and can spend so much of your time (learning how to) dodging mechanics. This means that these types of archetypes are really solid characters to learn the game on, or get better at noticing your surroundings. This specific iteration of Storm Brand is tailored to be a very fast and smooth mapping character, giving you the old Storm Brand feel which many of you missed. Because it converts all of its damage to Cold Damage, you also get an additional layer of Chill, which is heavily underestimated when people think about a characters durability. All in all, I mapped this character to 98 before making this guide and it never felt in any sort of danger, even pushing it through Delirious maps, Grand Design maps, Expedition and what not, it always felt capable for the task. Another small upside which is to be mentioned is that it plays with a lot of uniques. Generally, those are easier to gear for to newer players, as you have to make less decisions than you would when assembling rare pieces.

Minimum Charge Stacking

This section is a bit more complicated than my usual build, as it requires you to understand a bit of gimmicky stuff coming together. The main idea behind the build is to abuse items which give a lot of upside, but make you lose charges as a downside. Since we’re stacking minimum amount of Power Charges through Grand Spectrums, Ascendancy, and a Timeless Jewel. In this specific itteration of minimum charge stacking, you do care about the Cast Speed that Frenzy Charges give. Because of Tulfall we’re going to be aiming to have 1 less minimum power charge than maximum charges meaning you constantly lose just 1 Power Charge. This will make you gain Frenzy charges which we augment by Badge of the Brotherhood. This leads to the build having all its Frenzy Charges up all the time whilst maintaining all but one Power Charge and being able to abuse all the Charge Stacking items in the game.

Minimum & Maximum Charges

This might require a tad of explaining. Generally, in PoE, you have a Maximum of 3 Power Charges without doing anything. However, this doesn’t mean you actually gain those charges. You need a specific way to gain charges, usually. For example, you could run Power Charge On Critical Support. In that case, you would gain up to 3 Charges. You could augment your maximum Power Charges, and therefore be able to gain more of them. However, you could also have Minimum Power Charges. This means you wouldn’t have to gain them anymore, as you could never go sub the amount of minimum Power Charges you have. You would still need to invest into maximum amounts of Charges, as your minimum can never be above your maximum.

Obtaining Minimum Charges

This mechanic sounds strong, right? Well, it is.
However, usually, obtaining minimum charges is rather complicated. We’re using some combinations of Ascendancies, Jewels & the Passive Tree to gain 9 Minimum and 10 Maximum Power Charges. Those minimum charges are acquired by getting 4 from Hierophant, 1 from the Passive Tree, 1 from a Militant Faith & 3 from a single Grand Spectrum.

Reaping the Rewards

Obviously, going through all this pain and gimmicky midmaxing should give us quite some benefits right? It does indeed.
First of all, getting 9 Power Charges & 10 Frenzy Charges is a stupid amount of Damage. While Frenzy Charges grant you a total of 40% Cast Speed and 40% More Damage, the Power Charges take care of all the crit chance you can want. Now, because of stacking these, we use some interesting items.
For example, Replica Inya's Epiphany gives you 45% Increased Movement Speed, 4,5% Life Regenerated per second and a whopping 45% Increased Damage. This Life Regeneration pairs really well with Petrified Blood. We use Petrified Blood, in combination with Mind over Matter, to try and avoid taking large portions of our hits directly from our Life. This means that, because a part of incoming Damage goes to our Mana (and in our case Energy Shield because of the Eldritch Battery Keystone) and another part is not taking instantly but over time due to Petrified Blood, we almost take no damage we take instantly on our Life Pool. This is why this character almost never dies in maps, even though it only has approximately 1500 unreserved Life. Now, we still take a part of the non-mitigated damage over time, which is where our Leech (both to Energy Shield & Life) and Regeneration come in. Those almost completely counteract the downside of this incoming damage conversion.
Next up, the Willclash helmet on its turn grants you 45% Increased Elemental Damage & 45% Spell Block. To abuse the Spell Block at a maximum, we combine this with the Tempest Shield buff to almost become Spell Block capped for close to no investment.
Subsequently, Tulfall starts giving you absolutely bonkers amounts of Flat Cold Damage to Spells as well as doing the entire Frenzy Charge generation thingie making it a really solid choice as a weapon. Lastly, Malachai's Loop grants you a whopping 144% Increased Spell Damage, on top of its maximum charges. Because it’s such a cheap Shield, it’s also easy to find a corruption on it.

Passive Skill Tree, PoB, and Gem Links

You can find an optimized Path of Building here. Every build I release will use the community fork of Path of Building, which is maintained and updated in a much more regular fashion than the original one. You can find PoB’s Fork, by LocalIdentity, here.

If you are not comfortable with Path of Building, PoePlanner’s website offers you a non-PoB alternative to import the code from the above link. Do note that this does not have the same amount of Support as Path of Building has and it is highly recommended you install Path of Building to follow builds most optimally.

More information about the Passive Skill Tree, as well as all the Gem Links can be found on our dedicated page.

Passive Skill Tree, PoB & Gem Links

Ascendancy, Bandits, and Pantheons

Our Ascendancy, Bandit, and Pantheon Power page goes into detail about all the choices you need to make in these regards.

Ascendancy, Bandits & Pantheon

Gear Summary / TL;DR

A lot of this is explained more in depth in the Gear Page, however we will provide you with a basic idea of what gear you’re looking for in this short summary.

Gear, Jewels & Flasks

Our recommendation:

Item Slot	Item Name
Head	Corrupted +1 Power Charge Willclash
Amulet	Badge of the Brotherhood
Chest	Inpulsa's Broken Heart
Gloves	Rare Gloves with Resistances, Life & Necessary Attributes
Boots	Replica Inya's Epiphany
Belt	Darkness Enthroned with Life, Damage, Resists & Attribute Jewels as necessary
Rings	Call of the Brotherhood
Weapon	Tulfall
Shield	Malachai's Loop

Questions & Support

If you enjoy my content to such an extent that you’d like to support me and my work, or you have a specific question you request my private time for, *you can buy me a coffee over at Patreon *. At no point should you feel pressured to contribute, but if you do, your support means more to me than you will ever imagine.

Even though we try to make our guides as complete as possible, obvioulsy it’s possible you still have questions. We have an entire mod-team readily available to support you & your questions on Discord. You can find us on the ARPG Vault Discord. Make sure to open a Guide Help thread so things stay clear in the main channels.

Leveling

I highly recommend levelling this build as a different type of character. While Storm Brand generally performs in campaign, it usually doesn’t do so on a Hierophant & given the nature of this build, it’s fairly hard to make it work without a few pieces of gear which will only be obtainable after campaign. I recommend you resort to a generic Hierophant levelling strategy to pull this off and respect either whenever you’re ready to go to the starting budget gear or respec at the start of maps when you can afford a few of the unique items.

• Our step-by-step leveling walkthrough, which allows even more experienced players to save time and speed through the leveling process.
• Our guide to Unique Items for leveling, which helps you gear up your characters for the leveling process.
  Our beginner guide to Path of Exile, which answers many of the questions new players might have and will set you on the right path.

Credits

A huge shoutout goes to the unknown player who initially played a similar build on the ladder, making it possible for me to pick up his gearing choises by checking out his character and building upon that.