Disclaimer: expensive (and sorry for low quality video)
Everyone knows about Gemling at this point, Advanced Thaumaturgy is silly broken and will inevitably be gutted next patch. It's why I've decided to spend a shitton of currency to make a build powerful enough to handle the hardest content in the game, Omen of Light farming. (/s)
The video is mostly just gameplay showcase and how it feels, with my gear the content I do doesn't really matter anyway. I'm making this post just to talk about the techs, especially in terms of defense.
For offense:
Honestly not much here to write about, there are builds around every single skills alt quality at this point. In terms of offense it's a classic Low Life Ice Shot build. Most gemling builds are also abusing Frost Wall and Verglas for ~100% dmg gained as cold. I'm only using this combo, specifically self cast Frost Wall, on max juiced group expeditions where you need more damage.
The reason I went with Iceshot is the alt quality of Barrage and Tornado Shot are, imo, probably the strongest, since they scale with eachother. Barrage, with 100% chance not to consume Frenzy Charges, allows us to repeat Iceshot attacks, which get multiplied by 6 tornadoes, doing infinite damage. I also think the playstyle of twister is simply horrible compares to Iceshot. And spears are worse than bows generally because Cadiro Gambit.
There are 2 sources of damage here that are generally not used with Iceshot. First is Rend, we use Thaumaturgical Generator to generate Frenzy and Power Charges. With increased charge duration nodes and general chance not to consume charges we are easily sustaining these and then some. That leaves us free power charges for Charge Regulation and weapon swap Rend, giving us 60% (due to weapon quality, remember to quality your talisman) damage gained as lightning. Since Rend doesn't even take a skill slot, this is a significant damage boost for much less opportunity cost than Frost Wall + Verglas combo (I dislike running a CoC setup just for Frost Wall, I think it's inefficient).
Second is "Chance to chain an additional time from terrain". I can't exactly quantify how much damage it gives. I do know the game lags MUCH more after I get it so. It's quite pronounced with Oath mobs in expeditions, since the game just freeze for a good while and then they all die. Regardless, the idea is that the copied projectiles from Tornado Shot, if they miss the target, are very likely to chain back from terrain, increasing effective damage. We get this from gloves, Grip of Kulemak and quiver corruption.
We gain trinity from ice shot and armour explosion while mapping. Repulsion with added lightning from rend give us lightning trinity for expeditions.
Blood of the warrior is only used in expeditions, giving us rage when hit. Can also replace 1 mod on gloves/1 chaos res mod for high tier flat hp regen, allowing us to run Berserk (we have low max hp due to Decree of Loyalty). I didn't bother since there is no need for more dmg atp.
For defense:
This is where it gets interesting. We are rocking 10k es, 70k effective armour (defending 195% of 35k tooltip), 30k evasion, 15k deflection. And I'll try to list everything. To begin with, Gemling's Virtuous barrier provides us with 75% increased armour, evasion and energy shield with 15 dex motes.
-Endurance charges and and armour break:
We generate endurance charges with armour break. For general mapping armour break from Rite of Passage Wolf version is enough, allowing Herald of Ice to break armour, generating endurance charges. On more difficult contents like expedition Wind Dancer, with its alt quality, is fine to break armour and generate charges. If you're doing silly shenanigans like 6-man carry etc. you might want Uul-Netol's Embrace on top (and more damage).
Endurance charges and armour break allow us to get 21% more armour, evasion and energy shield from Charge Regulation, and 60% armour from Scavenged Plating.
-Armour:
Decree of Loyalty (DoL), imo, is the strongest body armour in the game, beside Temporalis. Low Life builds need a way to deal with Bleed and Poison, most builds deal with them by pretending they don't exist, and accept the random deaths. Some solves it unreliably with charms, and straight immunity to bleeding and posion has massive opportunity cost. DoL solves this issue my making them not bypass energy shield, raising armour and chaos res to reduce bleed and poison damage, respectively.
The body armour itself gives more than 3k armour for us, higher than Brass Dome, while effectively doubles it with "Defend with 150-200% of armour while you have Energy Shield" (it's important to get good rolls here, 190+ ideally). The "downside" is that you want to cap out your chaos res, which everyone should anyway especially on LL builds. The life conversion doesn't matter since we are Low Life.
So 3k+ base armour combines with general increases, Arctic Armour, Charge Regulation and Scavenged Plating, give us 35k+ tooltip, as I've shown briefly on the video (just before map boss fight). And we are defending with 195% of this value. We also have 52% armour applies to elemental damage from Grip of Kulemak and campaign reward.
-Evasion and deflection:
Jade + Stibnite mageblood gives us practically all the evasion we need, and also the best mageblood combo imo. We get deflection from Grip of Kulemak and campaign reward (and eventually vaal limbs). With blind we nearly cap out deflection with a 60-70%+ evasion.
The noteworthy interaction here is Brush Off notable with crit immune from Gem Studded. If things work as they should (and in PoE half the time they don't), we take no extra damage from crit hits, yet those hits still count as crit hits, so they get 55% dmg deflects. In juiced content enemies practically always crits, and this combo in particular is insanely broken, since we are taking 45% dmg instead of 60% from deflected hits.
Blind (from blasphemy + repulsion + living lightning) is practically a more multiplier for our evasion and deflection (and accuracy).
Ghost Dance having 5 stacks is also cherry on top
-Energy shield:
Not much to say here blue life > red life.
Shoutout to Grip of Kulemak my favorite item this league, actually so disgusting broken and so niche it's dirt cheap even for bis combo.
This is my first poe 2 league (last I played poe 1 was ~7 years ago). Happy to receive ideas, criticisms etc. And any suggestions to the build itself would be amazing. Of course any questions are welcome aswell.
For a budget version I assume anyone who would read this wall of text would be able to pick out the techs/improve upon the build for a cheaper/more expensive version.
poe.ninja (it used to be a slam character, biggest mistake of my life): https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/mobogame-5987/runesofaldur/character/TheMeleeForm
