POE Synthesis Duelist Double Strike Champion Build - Budget, Easy, Instant Leech

 

Quick Jump

• Pros & Cons
• Skill Tree 
• Gems Setup
• Gear Setup
• Leveling

 

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Instant Leech(!?!)
• Insane life pool
• Obliterates bosses
• Reflect-proof
• Eeeeasy playstyle
• Hardcore viable
• EXCELLENT on a budget
• You have FOUR bois

Cons

• Claw range is a bit like T-Rex arms
• Clear is good, but not top tier
• Has a few rare but scary counters
• Your friends will be jelly you have instant leech
• You have to listen to the Duelist say shit

 

POE Skill Tree 

Ascendancy points

Conqueror

A pretty decent defensive node, but it’s mostly good because it leads to

Worthy Foe

This is what makes the Champion so broken. It's basically a 30% MORE damage node with no downside AND removes the need for accuracy on gear. Aspect of Carnage is crying in the corner.

Unstoppable Hero

Bit of damage, bit of defenses, and stun immunity as long as we have fortify! Unfortunately, the only movement skill we can use is whirling blades (because claws) which is not very good at procing fortify, so there will be sporadic downtime unless...

Fortitude

No more downtime on fortify. We are now permanently stun immune without having to sacrifice evasion. You might say that this is a pretty small bonus, as we almost always had it before and we have 8k life with a good chunk of evasion. That's true, but when you have a build that can leech over 50k life a second, you just don't die unless you stop leeching. Let's not stop.

Bandits

Kill All

Pantheons

The Pantheon List

• Major Gods: Brine King
• Minor Gods: Garukhan

Passive Skill Tree

The idea is to pick up a few very efficient damage nodes, and the rest is just stacking a metric dick-ton of life. This tree is very flexible, so feel free to season to taste.

There's a lot of dangling damage nodes that are ~2.5% per point, like Aspect of the Lynx, Duality, Fencing, and Frenzy charges. There's also some 4% life nodes like Heart of the Oak and the 2 near Thick Skin, and a 3 point jewel up near Blood Drinker that comes with int, which we need. Overall I think this setup is the best bang for our buck, but feel free to tinker as you see fit.

 

Gems Setup

---

Hatred + Arctic Armour/Herald of Purity/Herald of Ash + Enlighten

So we need to run hatred for the insane damage, and the next most damage is Herald of Purity at 10%. Arctic armour is also very efficient defense here, and herald of ash brings up the rear with only 5% more damage and we already have a bleedsplosion clear effect. Start off using hatred and one of the other three. When you have a level 3 enlighten you can try adding a second one, but you'll only have enough mana for 2 double strikes before you'll have to whirling blades to leech mana back (at least it's on blood magic). Getting an enlighten to level 4 will allow for a 3rd double strike before going out of mana, so it's honestly a really nice QoL addition, but it's a bit pricey. Of course, if you don't wanna deal with mana problems at all, just stick with hatred plus one of the three the whole time, not unreasonable.

---

For below: Move the mouse to see the bold skill gems needed to affix

Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks Support - Culling Strike Support

Gotta go fast! We need to run it on blood magic, but not fortify, so I suggest adding cull in a 4L for convenient boss killing plus more attack speed from quality.

Blood Rage - Increased Duration Support - Ancestral Warchief

Blood rage is absolutely ridiculous for us. The attack speed, frenzy charges, and leech are all premium stats, so we want one we can manually cast attached to an increased duration. We don't even need to pick up vaal pact for survival since we're instant leech, so we get our life regen to counter its degen! We need the totem for boss deeps; link it to the cull on whirling blades for extra cheese.

Blood Rage - Summon Lightning Golem - Immortal Call - Frost Bomb - Enfeeble - Cold Snap

Immortal Call is really handy for avoiding bursty phys damage and frost bomb adds a deceptive amount of damage as we have few other sources of ele pen. I suggest putting these two on an increased duration since their durations are kind of short but their effects are huge. Next is my curse of choice, Enfeeble. The fact that guardians/shaper have 80% less curse effect means damage curses just don't do much, but accuracy/damage debuffs against bosses are so valuable that the increasing returns mitigate this somewhat. Plus Enfeeble synergizes well with CWDT since you only need the enemy debuffed if it's hitting you. Lastly we have Vaal Cold Snap, which is a new and AMAZING way to get frenzy charges against bosses plus a handy chill effect. They key is this line: "Every second, gain a Frenzy Charge if an Enemy is in this Skill's Area". I can't recommend this enough, even put it on increased duration if you can, although I didn't manage. Also note that if you link it to a cast when damage taken gem it will trigger the regular cold snap for free chills but still allow you to manually trigger vaal cold snap when you want.

 

Gear

Weapon 1 & 2 : Hellion's Paw

This is what makes the magic happen. Instant leech with the low cost of a crappy-dps claw with mediocre crit and attack speed. But, if we can get the damage we need it'll do just fine (thanks double strike!). Try to get at least one corrupted with power charge on crit, as there are no other great ways to sustain power charges. Crit multi, crit chance, and attack speed corruptions all add around the same damage, so for your offhand/second implicit I give the edge to attack speed, as it's also whirling blades speed.

+25% to Global Critical Strike Multiplier

7% chance to gain a Power Charge on Critical Strike

Helmet: Starkonja's Head

Just standard evasion helm stuff. You can get a rare if you want res or a bit more life perhaps, but that's tough to do and even tougher to get enchanted, so you're losing a LOT of damage realistically. You could go abyssus for full-on crazy DPS, but it's only 25% since we have so much flat phys already so I'd rather not die to phys damage all the time. Remember, ambition is followed by madness. For enchants, chance to deal double damage is noticeably better than the others.

Double Strike has a 15% chance to deal Double Damage to Bleeding Enemies (Enchantment Mod)

Body Armour: Gladiator Plate (Elder Item)

There are a lot of good chest options out there like Belly, Loreweave, or even just a good rare (since the temple prefix for T1 life + 8-10% life means there's a ton of chests out there with like 160 effective flat and 10% life). That said, the fact that there's an elder prefix for 1.1-1.5% base crit really helps fix our crit problem and just ends up adding a metric BEEFCAKE of damage. You can also get a chest with level 1 maim on it, but that's VERY expensive paired with attack crit, and the best DPS gem we have left is crit damage at 27% anyway, and we're losing 20% by stepping 20/20 maim to level 1 with 0q, so it's about 7% more damage, so it's a very late game upgrade.

+1 to Level of Socketed Support Gems , +52 to Strength ,40% increased Armour ,+111 to maximum Life ,+41% to Fire Resistance 17% increased Stun and Block Recovery Attacks have ,+1.44% to Critical Strike Chance 

Gloves: Haemophilia

We need to proc bleed somehow for double strike to work properly, and we could really use some explosion effect to help us clear, since we don't have projectiles or big AoE. It's sad to skip out on flat life since we have SO much %Life, but at least we can get it corrupted since it's unique. Try to get the highest attack crit corruption you can, since that is base crit, which is pretty nuts.

25% increased Damage over Time

+27 to Strength

Attacks have 25% chance to cause Bleeding

36% increased Attack Damage against Bleeding Enemies

Bleeding Enemies you Kill Explode, dealing 5% of their Maximum Life as Physical Damage

25% reduced Bleeding Duration An where Corrupted 

Boots: Goliath Greaves

Attack speed enchant adds a good chunk of clear speed and ele pen adds a bit of damage, particularly against shaper/guardians.

16% increased Attack and Cast Speed if you've Killed Recently (Enchantment Mod)

Amulet & Ring

Life and res first again! Throw in flat phys and some int, plus crit multi and/or phys damage added as cold if you can get it on your amulet. You'll have to pick up some int on the tree if you're short as we need 95 for the claw and 98 for max level lightning golem. The temple prefix for 70-79 life + 3-5% Life comes in big here, as it's a single prefix for both and just increases the number of t1 life jewelry out there in general.

Agate Amulet

+7 to maximum Energy Shield +89 to maximum Life 

Coral Ring

+71 to maximum Life

5% increased maximum Life 

+16% to all Elemental Resistances

+37% to Lightning Resistance

Two-Stone Ring

+74 to-maximum Life 

5% increased maximuin Life 

+42% to Lightning Resistance

+10% to all Elemental Resistances 

Belt: Stygian Vise

Life and res again, with a sprinkling of flask mods. Stygian is the best base if you can get your hands on a well rolled one, but that can be pretty tough (plus good abyssal jewels are expensive), so a leather belt will do fine. 

For the abyss jewel, nab the highest life jewel you can find with the “attack speed on crit” mod, as it is the highest damage mod available. Throw in crit multi or phys damage on claw attacks as a third mod when you can as they're about the same.

+98 to maximum Life

+44% to Fire Resistance

+40% to Cold Resistance

Flask

Lion's Roar, Granite Flask (Unused)

Taste of Hate, Sapphire Flask

Sin's Rebirth, Stibnite Flask

Chemist's Diamond Flask of Warding

Atziri's Promise, Amethyst Flask

Chemist's Jade Flask of Staunching

Jewel

Life and crit multi galore! Seriously, there are no damage mods on jewels that compare to crit multi, so just get life and as much crit multi as you can afford. Maybe a splash of res if you're short.

 

Leveling

Remember to run Chance to Bleed Support in any double strike setup until you have another way to bleed, like Haemophilia.

The good thing about double strike is it gains flat phys as you level, like a spell, as long as you can inflict bleed. The downside is it already takes a lot of gems to make this skill clear well, plus now we have to use Chance to Bleed because we can't use our Haemophilias early. This means double strike is stuck on single target duty for most of the leveling process, so we'll need another skill to clear.

Frost Blades is an excellent clearing skill, which comes at the cost of having dumpster single target, but that's perfect for us! I honestly feel like frost blades for clear with double strike for single target is the smoothest leveling you can get in this build.

Spectral Throw is about as good, but doesn't scale with melee damage and has the added downside of being garbage until you get LMP, and not truly shining until GMP. I think I prefer FB, but can't fault you for preferring ST.

Reave is an excellent clearing skill, but being momentum based feels a big clunky early on.

Blade Flurry is a staple and does good damage in all situations, but doesn't scale as well with monster density as other clear skills because it also has good single target. If there aren't any crazy dense league mechanics like incursions or breaches this would probably be fine, but we definitely have single target handled with double strike so the trade-off isn't ideal.

As for trees, it's pretty straightforward honestly, as we just get a ton of life and a dash of crit and claw damage. Feel free to pick up the nodes in the order you prefer, but if you want a suggestion you can refer to these:

50 Point Tree

66 Point Tree

89 Point Tree (~Level 67)

We want a good sprinkling of life, but mostly we want to rush our damage nodes as they're pretty far away. Keep in mind we want those accuracy nodes in the duelist starting area until we nab the worthy foe ascendancy. I only take the most efficient life nodes since I play softcore, but definitely just pick up more of that life if you're HC and you should be fine.

Once you're into the 60's, mostly having that last tree, pick yourself up 2 bloodseekers, haemophilia, and bargin bin 5L chest. Now you can transition to the final build pretty easily, although you can keep double strike in the single target 4L/5L.

 

POB

Mapping Setup: https://pastebin.com/iWbLCC1g

Shaper Setup: https://pastebin.com/mkeetiAT