Giant blooded avatar of fire build - how to?
This is a "i'm a new player (played PoE a couple months when it came out) and saw a cool thing that i want to try but i don't know how to develop" kind of thread, so bear with me please! I like warrior, it is just the kind of class i love and always play in most games if given the chance. I also love massive 2h weapons, so i was ecastic when i saw the "giant's blood" node very close to the warrior class starting area! I also noticed a nearby node, "avatar of fire", that tickled my pickle and made me fantasise about a Surtur build of sort; i also noticed a plethora of fire damage and ignite nodes approximately in the area, but that's it. I'm also VERY confused on how physical damage nodes like "smash" interact with avatar of fire.
Anyone else intrigued/theorycrafting this fire giant build? My guess is it would not have nearly enough tankiness outside of raw HP from STR nodes and i'm not sure the switch from physical/stun to 0.75fire/ignite/way less stun would actually be decent in terms of DPS. Some very good fire nodes are also pretty far away, in the SW and NW areas, and i dont' know if it would be worth going for them instead of prioritising 2h weapons/maces/HPreg/armour/stun nodes.
Comments
Ignite as an ailment scales very well with big single hits -- check out the Perfect Strike skill, it's very good for chunking off half of a boss's health bar with one swing.
I have had success so far focusing on stun, then taking nodes to get 100% armor break when I inflict sun, then supporting Perfect Strike with gems that give it less chance to ignite, but makes ignites last longer (it still has 100% chance to ignite when used with perfect timing) and one that makes it consume fully broken armor to deal even more damage. So far two or three cycles of stun->perfect strike have been enough to kill any boss. There's another node that makes armor break also reduce enemy fire resistance that looks tempting.
Full conversion effects like Avatar of Fire are a little weird but the tooltip explains it pretty well -- the base amount of A (physical) is converted to B (fire) and then affected by modifiers to B. So physical damage nodes on the tree will do nothing for your final fire damage output. That said, you will get a lot of fire stuff in your toolbelt as Warrior that can still let you live out that class fantasy without the restrictiveness of full damage conversion.
edit: Oh and Giant's Blood-- I really want to use this too because it's cool as hell, but it's pretty hard to sustain the triple strength requirement. Feels like something to circle back to later in the game when you've really refined your build.
How are you converting the final 25% of physical into fire as the first 75% conversion comes from Avatar of fire?