The Holy Bible

Fair warning to everyone reading this guide: this build isn't for everyone, because the price you pay for its power is comfort. This is not one of those one-button builds that walks in and deletes all content with a single key. Here you'll have to carefully watch your buff uptime while mapping and juggle three different buffs. And while you get used to it pretty quickly, at the start it can be a real problem for some people. So if you're not ready to do all of the above, please close this guide and don't get baited. But if you ARE ready to conquer everything the game throws at you for literal pennies, then welcome to the club.

Hey everyone. Today I want to offer you what is, in my opinion, the best league starter for 3.29.

When we were testing this build on stream (https://www.twitch.tv/ashimaar), we cleared all the normal content in blue gear on a 5-link, including Maven and regular Uber Elder. And once I equipped the key unique axe, I was able to clear 15 waves of Simulacrum, Uber Uber Elder, every T17 map and all the other Uber bosses without much trouble, on a build budget of about a bag of chips. In 3.28 I cleared all 4 Voidstones on this build within the first day and comfortably moved on to farming T17 maps. For all these reasons I consider it one of the best league-start builds.

So, our build is the Banner Stacker Champion. The power of the build, as you might have guessed from the name, lies in how broken stacking banners is. Honestly, I'm amazed this mechanic survives league after league untouched, because literally the moment you leave the acts you can get:

For anyone who doesn't play much, quick explanation: normally buffs like these take insane build investment to reach. But we can get all of it practically for free — the only catch is we have to press one extra button. You probably have a fair question: where do all these buffs even come from? Well, the answer is simple. Let's break it down.

Before we go further, I think I should explain how banners work, because I don't think many people have dealt with this mechanic before this video.

In 3.25, banners were reworked. Instead of a percentage reservation, they're now free. However, they no longer give a permanent buff. Now you have to place a banner for its effect to apply, but once placed they became far stronger than before. They also automatically deactivate when you leave their area. On top of that, there are new ways to extend their duration and more ways to invest into them than ever before.

When you press a banner skill, you plant that Banner at your current position, giving an aura to yourself and allies in the area around it. Leaving the banner's radius, or re-activating the skill, removes it. In principle, a player isn't limited to one banner. Although using multiple Banners is usually blocked by the condition: “While you have a placed banner, you cannot gain Valour.”

What is Valour?

It's a counter that increases under certain conditions while you have a banner skill, and it amplifies the power of those skills. Valour is a per-character counter, shared across every skill that uses it. Normally you can't gain Valour while a Banner is placed. By default, a player gains 1 Valour per melee kill, or per melee hit against rare or unique enemies, no more than once every 0.5 seconds, up to a maximum of 50.

Together, all these restrictions are what make banners a reasonably balanced mechanic — but our build completely breaks it and lets us place all three banners at once at the maximum Valour amplification, which is double the normal cap.

Now, let's take it step by step. First, we solve the problem that we can't accumulate Valour to amplify our banners while a banner is already placed. We solve this by picking this node in the Champion Ascendancy.

Now we can gain Valour, but how? Mobs only give 1 per kill, and hits on rares or uniques give half. How do we make gaining Valour efficient enough to justify the Ascendancy node? The answer is in the banner mastery: whenever we use a Warcry, we gain 5 Valour.

But doesn't that mean, on top of three banners, we now have to press a whole row of Warcries? Not at all. We can automate Warcry activation with Autoexertion. But now we have too much Valour — what do we do with it? Easy: by taking these passives in the tree we raise our maximum Valour to 105, which more than doubles the banner effect.

But now a third problem appears: the moment I leave the banner's radius, the buff drops off me. What do we do? Again, we have a simple solution. Literally the point right next to the max-Valour ones lets our banners linger on us for another three seconds after we leave their zone.

But the power of banners doesn't stop there. Right along the path we have nodes that give our banners an extra buff of +5% to all elemental resistances,

but because of the Valour amplification, those 5% turn into 105. Honestly, I still can't tell: is this a feature or a bug? Because with this node we can simply forget about elemental resists on our gear — as long as the banner effect is on us, they'll be comfortably capped. However, this does sometimes lead to silly deaths: lose focus and fail to refresh the banner within three seconds of leaving the zone, and you're left vulnerable to enemies' elemental attacks. That's exactly why I warned you at the start that just pressing one button won't cut it. Luckily, my PoB is set up so that all banners are the size of the Maven arena, or even Uber Elder's.

So on bosses you don't need to stress about it much — if you do everything right, your banners will stay up for half a minute.

I can't skip the point about the build being able to run Simulacrum. This potential fully opens up if you take this explosions node.

It's lovely and heavily boosts clear in enclosed spaces. The problem is the explosions only happen inside the banner and don't care whether the buff is on you or not. So on maps it barely does anything, and for that same reason I didn't add it to the PoB.

When you first start the build, our Warcry cooldown recovery will be fairly low and Valour will build up slowly. But even that's enough to permanently keep one of the banners up while moving. All thanks to this node in the Champion Ascendancy.

It refunds 30% of the Valour spent on a banner when we leave its radius. That means each time we get 31 Valour back, but the coolest part is that this number scales with the % increased Valour gained we pick up in the tree. So we'll actually get 62 Valour the moment we leave the banner's zone.

Okay, since in the current setup we can only keep one banner on us at a time, which one do we pick? Well, it's simple. Earthshatter is an absolutely broken skill, and its damage is more than enough to clear maps without issues. And to move faster from pack to pack, you just press Defiance Banner, which gives us movement speed. If a map is tough and you're noticeably dying on it, then instead of flying through it you press Dread Banner, which gives you capped block and also refunds 800 HP every time you block a hit. Yes, you lose some speed, but as they say — slow and steady wins the race.

When we reach a boss, we'll most likely be parked on it for a second or two. So I recommend starting the boss fight with Dread Banner, which gives us a defensive layer so we don't randomly die to the boss. Stay inside the banner circle and wait until you build up 105 Valour to place your second banner.

If the boss doesn't demand mobility from you, you can place War Banner to smash its skull in. Or, if it's a tough boss that requires dodging mechanics, or that deals damage with spells, we can place Defiance Banner second instead of War Banner — and now you really don't have to worry about dying. Then, as your final banner, you just place the third one, for damage.

Let me repeat one more time for anyone who read carelessly and missed which banner to place when, because this is a really important point:

War Banner — when you need damage.

Dread Banner — when you want extra tankiness through block.

Defiance Banner — when you want to run fast and get suppression.

While we're just running a map, we almost never place War Banner, because even though our Accuracy will be lower than our Life and Precise Technique won't work, Earthshatter's damage should still be more than enough. But if you do run into a beefy rare that won't die, you can slap War Banner on it.

Once we get to the pinnacle bosses, our banner rotation doesn't change. The only thing is that their phases are a bit longer, so you should watch your banner uptime carefully, because if a banner's effect ends while you're inside it, the effect drops instantly. If you see this little circle disappear from the skill bar, it means you need to place that banner again, ideally in the center of the arena so it covers the whole thing.

Our banners have certain effect breakpoints — they land at levels 19, 23 and 27. Each of these thresholds gives a significant increase to the buff's power. In theory you can reach level 27 by slotting March of the Legion, but there's not much point unless you're chasing the absolute maximum.

However, this knowledge matters for one reason: if you use a unique chest, we lose 20% banner effect. That's critical, because we can drop below an important breakpoint. The fix is simple — take level 21 banners and add a level 3 Empower to them. That compensates for the loss from the unique armor and puts us back on the breakpoint we need. Without this step, a unique chest can end up being a downgrade rather than an upgrade.

We need different quality on each Warcry for one single purpose — to desync their cooldowns.

Desyncing the Warcries is extremely important, because Earthshatter's spikes only detonate when a Warcry is used. If all your cries share the same cooldown, they'll fire simultaneously, and right after that you get a damage dip until they all come off cooldown again. This is especially noticeable on maps with the reduced cooldown recovery mod.

To avoid this, you want all your Warcries to have different cooldowns. The simplest way is to give them different quality levels. For example: one Warcry at 0% quality, a second at 10%, a third at 15%, a fourth at 20%. The higher the quality, the faster the skill recovers, and that way you spread their cooldowns out over time, ensuring a constant, steady stream of spike detonations. Alternatively, you can use a Runegraft of Time, which solves the same problem without messing around with quality.

Because all our cries are in Autoexertion, don't sweat their gem level. Many people mistakenly think we don't need to level the Warcries because their mana cost grows. That's not true. In Automation, the Warcry mana cost is always 10, and we reduce it to 0 using two ring crafts of “Non-Channelling Skills have -# to Total Mana Cost.” In the endgame version, a single ring craft with life catalysts is enough — it drops the cries' mana cost to two, so we spend 10 mana per second on cries. That's plenty to sustain them with leech and base regen.

In general, we can run any map mods except phys reflect. But there are nuances.

• If it's ele reflect, you need to grab an Infernal Cry. It converts part of your damage to fire and the problem is solved.
• If buff effect expire faster rolls, then instead of three seconds to refresh a banner we get one and a half. It's annoying but not critical — you just have to refresh banners more often.
• Aura-effect cuts our resists, because banners give less. So if your gear has no resists at all, I'd skip those maps, but on easy maps it's still playable.
• Max res and penetration mods are garbage that heavily increase the damage we take without Divine Flesh. Playable if the map has no additional damage mods.
• Cannot regen — another trash mod, but still playable if you turn off the Automation support.
• Less recovery — pretty much the same as cannot regen. Tolerable, but unpleasant.
• Cannot leech on its own isn't that bad, but combined with other mods, like cannot regen, you need to skip it. Without leech and regen we simply can't recover health.
• Junk like less accuracy and enfeeble heavily cuts accuracy and turns off Precise Technique, which means –25% damage. It's bad, but not the end of the world — you can run it, but better not touch bosses.
• Less block chance — if the map has no damage mods, it's free. But if the map has crits or extra damage or monster damage, I'd skip it, because it heavily cuts your banner block and you become glass.
• Another annoying one is monster block. It just makes them fairly tanky. You can, of course, take an attack mastery to ignore block, but respeccing the tree every time… I just can't be bothered. But if you run Expedition, this is an absolute must-take, because there block procs on mobs almost every time and without this mastery you'll be killing them painfully slowly.
• As for damage mods: we have no crit immunity, and it's relatively hard to pick up. So I just recommend skipping maps that have crit + a damage mod. Or play more carefully. On a well-funded build this is no longer an issue, but at league start it's still important to know that running two or more damage mods is dangerous, especially if one of them is crit.
• One more important point: once we get the Uber Shaper helmet, it's very important to beware of mods like steal charges, less defence, less armour. Because the helmet hits us ourselves, and these mods make us take far more damage from our own attacks. Better skip those maps unless you have a huge armor buffer.

The single strongest item for our build is this Breach axe.

Last league the axe cost a fair bit of currency in the first couple of days, but on stream I managed to drop it myself for around 25k chaos. Everyone on stream managed to drop it themselves too. The atlas tree for farming Breach will be in my Telegram channel, along with the Breach tree that makes dropping the axe easiest.

The axe's power is that it lowers Warcry cooldown recovery to one second, which frees up a big chunk of the tree. On top of that you'll gain more Valour, and with five Warcries this node gives us an insane amount of increased damage,

which effectively makes it a 1000 DPS axe. This axe is priority number one to buy, because with it we'll be clearing all content.

Once you get the axe, we'll have enough Rage sustain to swap one of the nodes for the alternate Oshabi Ascendancy. This passive is very strong if a build can refill its Rage every five seconds. And we happen to be one of the builds that can. So the moment you buy the axe, feel free to take the Oshabi passage and get yet another power boost.

Among the useful uniques, we have Carnage Heart, which gives us life leech and fixes our attribute troubles;

Belt of the Deceiver, which gives us a more reliable source of Intimidate than Intimidating Cry;

Lion's Roar — a flask that gives us 10% More Damage.
That's a significant amount of damage, especially in single target.

Sinvicta's Mettle — an axe you can buy for cheap by the end of the acts. It's a good transition weapon that'll carry you to T15 maps without much trouble.

But the coolest item for our build, especially in the first days, is Ancestral Vision. Normally nobody plays with this jewel, because for it to work you need to double-overcap suppression. And nobody's going to invest that hard just for ailment immunity — it's much easier to slot a Stormshroud and avoid shock. But in our case it just so happens that the banner giving us 200% movement speed also gives 200% suppression, which in solo gives us full avoidance of all ailments. And if the banner effect is still a bit weak and you didn't quite hit 200%, we already took these life nodes, which additionally give a small chance to avoid ailments.

That's it for the starter uniques. And honestly, everything above is enough to comfortably clear all the normal content in the game. Just don't forget to press your banners and everything will be smooth sailing.

• Lion's Roar — mandatory, gives significant single-target damage for cheap.
• Life Flask — I recommend always keeping a life flask with instant recovery on low life. Combined with the Ryslatha pantheon, you'll restore almost your entire HP pool if you press it in time. This has saved me many times in critical situations, especially on bosses. Another plus of the instant flask: on maps with reduced recovery, the instant flask instantly regens all HP and the map mod penalty doesn't apply to it.

Then pick two flasks from the following:

• Silver Flask — if you don't yet have a medium cluster with the Lead by Example mod (permanent onslaught).
• Sulphur Flask — extra damage, a good option for bosses.
• Basalt Flask — extra armor, useful for the Uber-helmet version or if you're short on physical defense.
• Jade Flask — extra evasion, increases EHP and adds comfort (don't use it together with Unwavering Stance).
• Bottled Faith — an endgame flask purely to boost single target on bosses. It's a Sulphur flask, so don't run two of them, since the effect won't stack.
• Quicksilver Flask — always useful.
• Sapphire/Ruby/Topaz Flask — if we're farming a boss with an excessive arsenal of one damage type. 5% max res is no joke.

The main thing for us is to get the Lead by Example and Mob Mentality mods as soon as possible.

The first gives us permanent onslaught, letting us swap the Silver flask for something more useful — for example, if you've already bought the axe and taken the Oshabi Ascendancy, you can take a Jade flask that makes early mapping much comfier. Or slot a Basalt flask and enjoy the extra armor. Mob Mentality lets us refund four points in the tree where the Defiant Strand node is.

Two more great notables on a medium cluster are Haunting Shout and Warning Call. The first is a more reliable source of Intimidate, because the Intimidate from Intimidating Cry drops the moment you press another Warcry. So a more reliable source of Intimidate is a must. Warning Call, in turn, gives us 100% increased Armour.

To fit both medium clusters, we'll also need to get a large cluster:

In the suffixes we look for Heavy Hitter or Martial Prowess (the second is better, but any works to start). We absolutely need a life-leech source on the large cluster. That's either Drive the Destruction or Feed the Fury. Both nodes are good, but once we get Overleech, Feed the Fury becomes much better. The third node can be literally anything. Most often you'll see Fuel the Fight there — a perfectly fine node — but Run Through is better, or Vicious Skewering. The best third mod, though, is Devastator, but it's extremely rare and expensive. If it rolls for us, we celebrate. You can also try to fracture it, or sell the base and buy a new cluster if it rolled solo with no other mods.

To be that magic level 68 by the time you reach Kitava, and also make a nice bit of currency on the side, I recommend that from the moment Heist opens, you drop in on every level-up and buy out demolition contracts.

Why demolition specifically? Simply because they spawn generic chests, which often drop chaos and other useful currency. And, surprisingly, currency shows up in those chests more often than in the currency chests found in other contracts. It's important to go in every single time after leveling up, because when you level up, the Heist vendor's stock refreshes and you get the chance to buy new contracts. If you run out of Chance Orbs (which is what you buy those Heist contracts with), don't be afraid to trade 1–2 chaos for some, because your investment will easily pay for itself. In the end, these Heist trips not only keep us on-level with the zone — which makes life much easier — but also earn us the starting currency you can spend on early uniques that simplify progression even further.

Importantly, before you run contracts, you need to unlock Vinderi,

because his innate ability gives us a 14% chance to double whatever's inside a chest, which means on average every 7th chest will have double rewards. To unlock Vinderi, you need to run any contract with the following Heisters: Karst -> Huck -> Niles -> after which you'll unlock Vinderi.

In the pinned message on my TG channel I've attached a PoB with a step-by-step guide for gems and the tree. I ran through the acts several times myself and arrived at what is probably the most convenient way to level this build. Right at the start I recommend creating a Scion alongside your main character. It's called a mule — this character is used to kill Hillock, get a few free scrolls, buy some items from vendors, or just grab an Iron Ring. In the PoB I've also included a regex you can use to check vendors for items. Please carefully study the gems section in the PoB before you start, so you understand which link colors you need. Everything is laid out in great detail there. Just don't forget to switch your loadout in the top-right corner at the right times.

In Act 1 we need to grab Frostblink to move more efficiently, but we won't have enough starting intelligence. To get it we can take these two nodes,

which we can later replace by buying a simple intelligence amulet.

After that we can remove the two nodes mentioned above to reallocate them more efficiently. If you're unlucky with the amulet, don't worry — in Act 3 you'll get one for free from a mandatory quest. Most importantly, once Frostblink hits gem level 4, do not level it any further.

Another important point you can't skip is your gem reward choice. Even though Earthshatter isn't in the PoB until level 68, it's very important to take it as a reward from Nessa and put it in your swap weapon slot so it gains experience. On top of that, while running labs, instead of gambling something, we absolutely need to keep adding quality to Earthshatter, because this skill scales with quality like no other, and on day one every 1% is worth at least 1 chaos. So decide what you want: gamble trying to hit an expensive alternate gem, or take the small but, most importantly, steady profit.

In Act 2, for the bandit choice we pick Alira — she helps us cap resistances early and makes leveling smoother. You can change your bandit choice later with a vendor recipe.

The next important point while leveling is Precise Technique.

This node is very strong, especially at the start, but it needs special attention. If your life ever exceeds your accuracy rating, you stop getting this buff. The PoB is set up so you basically can't screw it up, but people on stream have sent me PoBs where somehow their HP exceeded their accuracy… To check whether the node is working, just open your character panel, select Sunder in your skills, and look at this line.

If it's higher than your HP value, you're good. If not, try not to take life nodes. Importantly, around level 30 we should take this mastery.

It lets us turn off Precision and slot in another Warcry plus add Autoexertion, which adds a lot of comfort, since we no longer have to press the Warcries ourselves.

Important note: even though we turn Precision off, you should not remove it from your links. Keep leveling it, because later, after beating Kitava, you need to buy the Arrogance support from Lilly, link it to Precision, and now turn it back on.

The next important point comes after completing the first Labyrinth. Here we choose our Ascendancy. For the first Ascendancy I recommend taking First to Strike, Last to Fall,

because it significantly speeds up your act progression. But to keep it up permanently, we need to put Corrupting Fever + Lifetap in our links. On top of that, our main links often simply don't have two free red sockets, so we have to put them in the swap weapon slot — which means that to activate Adrenaline each time, we need to:

1. swap the weapon set,
2. press Corrupting Fever,
3. then swap the weapon set back.

If you can't be bothered with that, there's an alternative for you: after the first lab, take this Slayer passive.

Yes, you won't run as fast as a professional speedrunner, but your gameplay will be much more comfortable. Additionally, I recommend running the second and third labs together right before going into Kitava. By that point, from questing, you'll get free Orbs of Regret anyway, which right there in the labyrinth let you refund the Slayer nodes and swap your Ascendancy to Champion. Each point costs just 5 Regrets, which means 10 free Regrets for two points. Once you've swapped your Ascendancy and hit level 68, you'll be ready for a respec. At this point we respec with gold — specifically, we'll need 24 thousand gold (calculated for a level 68 character).

Alternatively, you can spend Regrets, but keep in mind that the gold respec cost grows with level, while Regrets still cost the same. So I'd save them for later tree changes.

In the pre-Uber endgame build we add the Glorious Vanity jewel. The most important thing is that it says “in the name of Xibaqua.” The number doesn't matter to us at all. We need this jewel to get the Divine Flesh keystone.

Additionally, since we're converting part of our damage to chaos, it wouldn't hurt to grab a unique armor that greatly increases our survivability against that damage type — namely, The Fourth Vow. Combined with the jewel, we get significant resistance to elemental attacks, especially the ones that penetrate resistances.

And since we're planning to go for Uber bosses, we absolutely need to prepare for the fact that most of them have attacks that penetrate elemental resistances. If we split our damage between our main type and chaos, the penetration won't be nearly as strong. This will be especially relevant when we come face to face with the Uber Shaper to obtain that coveted helmet, which heavily boosts our damage. Without this jewel and chest, the Shaper fight will be far harder than if we prepare for it.

And yeah, you could just buy the helmet, but why, when you're starting on what's arguably one of the best bossers, which — if you do everything right — can completely ignore most of an Uber boss's mechanics.

But if you do decide to push the build into uber-uber content, we open the uber-endgame loadout and see what's there. The strongest development vector will be the helmet from the Uber Shaper.

But before you put it on, you should ideally reach 25–30 thousand armor, otherwise you'll simply kill yourself because of the following mod:

When you Attack, take 15-20% of Life as Physical Damage for
each Warcry Exerting the Attack

The moment we put the helmet on, we're required to switch to Sand Stance and stay in Sand Stance, because that way we reduce the self-damage we take by 20%.

You should also ideally find phys reduction on the chest,

and phys taken as elemental,

but honestly, even with that I've had trouble sustaining properly. As a solution, I was suggested to look at the Divine Shield version of the build, where with the combination of these two nodes we start gaining energy shield per hit taken, and in theory this solves the problem. But in practice, during testing, the Slayer Overleech jewels helped me far more. Overleech in general is some kind of broken mechanic — in half the cases when I tested it, I only survived thanks to it. But recommending Forbidden jewels is a tricky thing, as you understand: if even five people on the server snipe them, the price can fly to the moon. So that one's up to you and your budget. And honestly, I don't really see the point in pushing the build that far. For me, this is a build to just clear normal content, then comfortably kill or even carry bosses in the first couple of days, earn currency for another build, and then respec into something with more potential. Ideas so far are either Waldo Gladiator, the “kvas” build from ExMagistr, or maybe we'll try something with the new skills, but so far that looks questionable.

Either way, folks, all the build links will be in the Telegram channel. And it might happen that some info gets outdated, but no worries — I'll also leave a link to a post on Telegram where I break down all the build's pitfalls in detail, plus the most up-to-date PoB will be there.

Now about the atlas: on stream we threw together two setups. The first is for rushing to T16 and dropping the axe along the way, in case you couldn't buy it from trade. Then we respec into farming Kalguur + Beasts once we've settled on T14 maps with two Voidstones in our pocket. Until you have 2 Voidstones, don't respec the atlas into Beasts, because your map sustain will drop noticeably.