TbXie's Splitting Steel Champion Pantheons, Ascendancy & Bandits (PoE Necropolis 3.24)

Ascendancy (Duelist- Champion)

Master of Metal

Given we are an impale build, this note gives you permanent Armour as well as an insane amount of Damage. Given the Ascendancy point deals about 25% of your damage, as well as giving you Armour is just really solid. Taking it early makes the campaign easy because 1000 Armour makes a lot of the incoming damage irrelevant.

Unstoppable Hero

This node is honestly just a step up to Champions permanent Fortify. We can’t get Fortify before Merciless Lab, so this node is wasted until then but it’s a solid notable whenever you complete Merciless Lab.

Fortitude

Champion’s Bread & Butter. It enables Fortify on builds which otherwise can’t have Fortification. 20% Less Damage Taken is just one of the best defenses in the game.

Inspirational

This node makes your Banner, which is giving you Impale in our case, free as well as giving you some extra Aura Effect. It meshes with our other choices well and is a solid last Ascendancy to pick up.

Bandits

This build doesn’t need anything from the Bandit options, so you should kill all. Oak is just too weak to warrant the two skill points and Alira and Kraityn don’t do anything for us. Two skill points from Eramir it is!

Pantheons

Major God

No debate here, you’re using Brine King here to be immune to freeze.

Minor God

Again, no real choice here, Soul of Abberath is the pick here. We need to get Burning Immunity in nowadays PoE because of Harbingers, Exarch monsters and so on.

Upgrading your Pantheons

Whilst upgrading your Pantheons never hurts you (besides for this particular outlier), there’s not that much you’re getting out of upgrading your Pantheons on this build. Whatever you do, just make sure you never upgrade Soul of Shakari for this character as that does hurt us.

Pantheon powers can be upgraded by using Divine Vessel in the Map Device while you are activating the particular Map that contains the boss you need. Once you’ve killed the boss and captured his soul, you can consume the Divine Vessel, which shows up filled in the map device, or deliver it to Sin in Oriath for extra dialogue relating to the game’s lore.

Main Page / TL;DR