Welcome to PoE build of the week, which is about the Rolling Magma Deadeye Build. Thanks to Mathil and his new build. This Deadeye uses Sire of Shards to cast Rolling Magma, stacking an unreasonable number of Chains and some juicy Herald of Ash explosions to create a screensaver of death.
How Does This Work?
Rolling Magma is a spell that lobs an exploding, fiery basketball. Where it bounces, it detonates, bouncing a number of times equal to our chains. We'll talk more about this later. Naturally, we want to fill the screen with these until our eyes bleed. The best way to do so is the Sire of Shards Unique Staff. This iconic weapon adds additional projectiles and fires them all in a circle around us. The key here is that the projectile pattern is terrible for a single target, mostly hitting everything except what we're aiming at. So whenever we encounter a tough enemy, we'll reach into our jean pockets and pull out our handy dandy Annihilating Light. The staff deals triple damage with elemental skills and lets us use a separate set of gems for focused boss killing. With this weapon swapping strategy, we can lay waste to bosses and wipe entire screens with relative ease, if you don't mind pressing an extra button from time to time.
Offence
Let's have a closer look at what makes Rolling Magma an excellent choice. The Inevitability Unique Jewel reduces Rolling Magma damage by half but increases it back up by 40% for every chain. Mathil notes that to make this Jewel worth our time, we'll need to grab all the additional chains we can, one from the gem itself if we sneak it up past level 20, another from the Deadeye Ascendancy, and one from the relevant helmet enchantment. With this investment, we can get a nice stack of extra damage and AoE from the Jewel.
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DID YOU KNOW? |
This build uses some defensive auras, which we'll talk about later. But the downside is that we're left with no mana to cast our skills. To solve this, we'll grab Eldritch Battery which moves our energy shield to be used as mana. This also enables the use of Herald of Ash, providing some extra damage for clearing and, more importantly, some glorious chain reactions. For our single target setup, it makes sense to use the Slower Projectile Support to encourage a tighter bouncing pattern. We can even craft Ethereal reflected jewelry from the Lake of Kalandra for a massive further reduction in projectile speed. We'll also use Arcanist Brand, linked to Fireball, and doubled with the Runebinder Keystone as an extra tool to focus down tough foes. Generally, we invest in critical strikes in our trees, gems, and gear, which is simply an efficient way of pushing up our damage.
Defence
The defences for this build are relatively simple. We'll invest in life and evasion, somewhat relying on our movement speed boosted by the special Deadeye ability Tailwind to get us out of trouble. The biggest concern here is our resistance. Annihilating Light, our single target staff reduces all our elemental resists by as much as 70% while it's equipped. To avoid getting annihilated ourselves, we should run the Purity of Elements aura, and thanks to Eldritch Battery, which we mentioned earlier, we can run this as well as Grace for the extra evasion. It's also worth picking up the Fire Mastery, which recovers 2% of life when we ignite a non-Ignited enemy, as every little bit of sustain helps.
Conclusion
This build is straightforward to set up and feels great to play. And like many Mathil builds, it's visually spectacular, allowing you to fill the screen with fiery strobe lights. With a little practice and a little investment, you, too, can be rolling in the deep. Thanks to Mathil for putting this build together.
Reference
Path of Exile: Build of the Week Season 10 Episode 2 - Mathil's Rolling Magma Deadeye
Delivering On The Self Cast Rolling Magma Promise & It's Surprisingly Good