POEGuy's Herald of Agony Champion (Poe Keepers of the Flame 3.27)

Introduction

This is a one-button build; very tanky and designed to efficiently farm high monster-density content, while also excelling at bossing. It’s also excellent for farming Simulacrums and 5-ways!
If I had to sum up this build in a few words, they would be: tanky, lazy, and fun.

This build is fully automated – all other skills trigger on their own as you spin. However, please take your time and read this guide carefully, as there are several small details that can completely brick the build.

Video build guide and gameplay showcase

And here you have gameplay footage (showcasing different farming strategies)

Build Overview

In this section, I will outline the pros, cons, & the general play style.

Pros

+ Strong defenses (build is incredibly tanky)
+ Full-screen wipes (great AoE clears)
+ Passive playstyle (you just spin around and enemies die)
+ Can do harder content (like Simulacrum, 5-ways, T17 maps)

Cons

– The passive playstyle is not for everyone

Playstyle

For this build, all you need to do is press and hold the Cyclone skill and move throughout the map. While channeling, we will trigger multiple other spells that apply poison stacks onto nearby enemies. By poisoning enemies, we summon our Agony Crawler minion, which will deal the damage for us. So we aren’t the ones dealing the damage: this is actually a minion build.

Make sure to use the provided REGEX filters when rolling your maps. There are a bunch of map modifiers that can break the build!

Damage Scaling & Defensive Layers

We scale our damage mostly through Gem Levels and Maximum Virulence. We gain plenty of Gem Levels from our items, and we increase Maximum Virulence through our medium cluster jewels (Pure Agony notable) and by improving the quality of our Herald of Agony Skill Gem.

As for defenses, this build is a beast! We achieve 42 permanent Fortification stacks, have Endurance Charges, decent Spell Suppression, higher maximum elemental resistances, good life regeneration, strong physical damage reduction, we are Block Chance capped, and also have good Spell Block.

PoB and Passive Skill Tree

You can find an optimized Path of Building here. Every build I release will use the community fork of Path of Building. You can find PoB’s Fork by LocalIdentity through this link.

PoB & Passive Skill Tree

Gear Summary

This build is very easy to set up because it uses many unique items. Relying on uniques allows you to put the build together faster and saves you a lot of hassle when it comes to character optimization.
Since this is an late-endgame build designed for difficult content, keep in mind that it’s not cheap. You should have a good amount of Divine Orbs and a character around level 94 before starting this setup. I’m mentioning these two requirements to help players transition smoothly into the build without any issues.

The setup should look something like this:

Item Slot	Item Name	Rarity	Notes
Head	Helmet with +2 Minion Skills and Good Life	Rare	Check the crafting section to learn how to make and avoid overpaying!
Amulet	Ashes of the Stars	Unique	Try to buy one with “30% to Quality of All Skill Gems”
Chest	Dialla's Malefaction	Unique	Ideal corruptions: “+2 to Level of Socketed Minion Gems” OR “+1 to Level of Socketed Gems”
Gloves	The Celestial Brace	Unique
Boots	Boots with “Unaffected by Poison”	Rare	Check the crafting section to learn how to make and avoid overpaying!
Belt	4 Flask Mageblood	Unique
Ring#1	Circle of Nostalgia	Unique	with Agony Crawler Damage & 40% Mana Reservation; Apply 20x Fertile Catalyst at the end
Ring#2	Crafted “Onslaught on Hit” ring	Rare	Check the crafting section to learn how to make and avoid overpaying!
Weapon	The Dark Seer	Unique	With “Maximum Life per Level”
Shield	The Squire	Unique

Read the gear page for details on all these items!

Gearing

Ascendancy, Bandits, and Pantheons

The Ascendancy, Bandit, and Pantheon Power page goes into detail about all the choices you need to make in these regards.

Ascendancy, Bandits & Pantheon

Map modifiers

[READ] When pasting this REGEX filter into the game, some machines may add extra spaces at the beginning and end of the text. You’ll need to remove those spaces for the REGEX to work properly! So if your REGEX doesn’t seem to be working, it likely means you’re experiencing this weird bug.

TIER 16 MAP ROLL: “!ur$|gen|s rec|r li|o al|re he|on,”
TIER 16.5 & T17 MAP ROLL: “!ever|tiles$|r damage$|poss|k at|r li|cores|wb|!\d+% increased monster c|uct|oner|sou|lier|!kes|efe|‘v|’ mi|non|d at|r el|s rec|gen|h el|!rune|!rune|wak” // The recommended Tier 17 maps are: Abomination, Fortress, and Sanctuary. Try to avoid Ziggurat and Citadel!

**You can save these regex filters in the “Awakened PoE Trade” program and bind them to a hotkey.

Common Mistakes

• The player does not have Tornado of Elemental Turbulence”, Ball Lightning of Orbiting , and Cyclone LEVEL 1! They will chunk your life down pretty fast if you level these gems any further -> all three must stay at level 1!
• The player doesn’t have 100% Chance to Avoid Being Shocked (You get it from your Mageblood Flask setup!). Without it, the “Stormshroud” jewel becomes useless (will not grant elemental ailment immunity anymore).
• The player has rolled ‘Immunity to Poison during Effect’ on one of their flasks, or ‘Chance to Avoid Being Poisoned’ on their boots, or has taken the mastery ‘Immune to Poison if […]’, or it has ‘Chance to Avoid Being Poisoned’ on an Abyss Jewel. These effects will disable The Golden Rule jewel -> resulting in a big DPS loss!
• The player isn’t using the provided REGEX filters! Some modifiers can brick this build! For example “Monsters have a 50% chance to avoid Poison, Impale, and Bleeding”!
• The player is not applying Despair on tougher bosses. the player does not have sources of Wither in his setup

Good luck!