PoEVault's Corrupting Fever Champion Gear, Jewels, and Flasks (PoE Trial of the Ancestors)

Gear Summary / TL;DR

These items strike a balance between power and cost-effectiveness. If you want to explore more options for Gear (both budget and high-end), and Flasks, or get more information on alternatives and speciality items, please ensure you read this page in its entirety.

If you are a newer player and crafting scares you, please check out this guide from Velyna as it goes over a lot of very important things and might be helpful to you: https://www.poe-vault.com/guides/beginners-guide-to-crafting-and-upgrading-in-path-of-exile()

Our recommendation:

Item Slot	Item Name
Head	Rare Pig-Faced Bascinet
Amulet	Rare Onyx Amulet
Chest	Skin of the Lords
Gloves	Haemophilia
Boots	Dragonscale Boots
Belt	Doryani's Invitation OR Rare Stygian Vise
Rings	Rare Two-Stone Ring (Cold / Lightning Resistances) OR Amethyst Ring OR Mark of Submission
Weapon 1	The Poet's Pen
Shield	Saffell's Frame

Armour

Skin of the Lords We need a Skin of the lords with the links: 3Red 1 Green 1 Blue. We mostly use this for the +2 levels and global defence modifier. That said, there are several strong notables we can acquire through using this armour. You can save a point by taking Resolute Technique or Call to Arms, you can enable Iron Will in the later stages of the build through the use of this armour and a vast number of other notables. The primary recommendation here is going to be Iron Will. That said, you should explore your options.

There are some notables that you should always avoid. I will list some of the most egregious I can think of, but I will probably forget some.
You must, under no circumstance, take the following Notables on your Skin:

1. Zealoth’s Oath
2. Ancestral Bond
3. Blood Magic
4. Supreme Ego
5. Vaal Pact

Helmet

Pig-Faced Bascinet

1. High Intelligence
2. High Life
3. Resistances (until capped)
4. No influences as we want Eater/Exarch here later.

There are no important Helmet Enchants for this build, but the best one is Corrupting Fever deals 40% increased damage

Chest

Our ideal chest is Skin of the Lords. Now this chest can be a bit tricky, as its sockets cannot be modified through normal means.
We ideally want our chest to have the Iron Will keystone, 3 red, 2 blue and 1 green socket. We are more than happy to settle for 3 reds, 1 blue and 1 green as the sixth link is not at all important.

Boots

Armour/Evasion bases are preferable, such as Dragonscale Boots. We can settle for a pure armour base however if the market shifts that way.
Prioritise stats as follows:

1. Movementspeed
2. Life
3. Resistances (Until Capped)
4. No Influence, this is important as we want Exarch/Eater here later.

Gloves

Here we simply want Haemophilia and there are not really any viable alternatives. Nothing that matters for us has a variable here, so just avoid getting corrupted ones and you’re good. You will want to give these 1 white socket, ideally on the blue socket, so that Kinetic Blast can be swapped for Frenzy on bosses later.

Weapon

The Poet's Pen

1. Damage over Time Multiplier
2. Physical Damage over Time Multiplier
3. Level of all Spell Skills
4. Level of all Physical Spell Skills
   Whatever you can get for cheap works, do NOT invest heavily in this as you will be replacing it with the aforementioned pen ASAP.

Shield

Saffell's Frame Is the go-to choice here. Several things roll here, and ideally, we want them all as high as possible.
I would advise focusing on spell block and elemental resistance, spell damage does not hurt either but it’s not hugely important.

Accessories

Amulet

Ideally, we want this slot to be a bank for damage over time modifiers, and attributes. Our primary reccomendation is Onyx Amulet.
Prioritise stats as follows:

1. Damage over Time Multiplier
2. Level of all Physical Skill Gems
3. Level of all Spell Skill Gems
4. Dexterity
   #Life
5. Resistances (Until Capped)

Any combination of these modifiers that help you reach attribute caps and grabs one or two of these damage mods is more than good enough early on.

Rings

Rare Two-Stone Ring or Rare Amethyst Ring are the primary reccomendations here. One of them will need to be Warlords Influenced to access the affix “curse enemies with vulnerability on the hit”. Until this is achieved, we run Mark of Submission with a Vulnerability Gem in it to automate our Vulnerability. Make this swap into double rare rings once you feel resistance pressure, or want to invest in chaos resistance.
Prioritise stats here as follows:

1. Attributes (until needs are met)
2. Life
3. Resistances (until capped)
4. Damage over Time Multiplier (This is a luxury affix and comes in when we have two rare rings. Achieved with Essence of Delirium)

Belt

Doryani's Invitation of the physical variety is our recommended go-to here. It provides excellent resistance, decent physical damage and is usually not too expensive.
As this is essentially a Rustic Sash with resistances, you should check the price of a rustic with similar resistance modifiers and go for that if it is cheaper.

Jewels

Standard Jewels

Standard Jewels are really powerful for this build and can get expensive. Getting two mods early on is generally extremely powerful, getting three mods later will be a very big upgrade. We recommend doing two damage mods on your early jewels and generally would recommend sticking to this philosophy and doing triple damage mods rather than life modifiers. This is a personal preference. Prioritise affixes as follows:

1. Global Physical Damage over Time
2. Physical Damage over Time Multiplier
3. #% Increased Maximum Life
   #Minions deal #% increased Damage (this is only valuable once you have the thread of hope to allocate Spiritual Aid)

Special Jewels

Thread of hope

We want a Thread of Hope with a Very Large Ring size. We obviously want this with as low of a resistance penalty as possible, but exactly how much of a penalty you can handle is up to you and your gear.

Watcher’s Eye

Watcher's Eye Is a great item that offers a multitude of flexible options to many builds. This is no Exception. You can opt for more offensive modifiers if you wish, but we feel the mods we are going with here are overall the best options. You want the following:

1. You take #% reduced Extra Damage from Critical Strikes while affected by Determination
2. +#% to Damage over Time Multiplier while affected by Malevolence

Glorious Vanity

We are looking for a Glorious Vanity in the name of Xibaqua. We only want to access the notable conversion with this jewel, we are not converting any mentionable nodes and such the seed on the jewel does not matter. Only the names.

Socketing such a jewel into your tree will convert the closest Keystone into a new Keystone, named Divine Flesh.
What this keystone does, is make it so all chaos damage bypasses our energy shield, and 50% our incoming elemental damage is instead taken as chaos damage. It also happens to give us +5 maximum chaos resistance, which is very handy.
It is very, very important that you do NOT enable this jewel in your build, until such a point as your elemental resistances are capped, your chaos resistance is capped and your chaos resistance is greater than your elemental resistance.
This can be confusing to newer players, but I’ve tried to keep it as simple as I could. Please stop by the discord if you have any further questions regarding this jewel.