Difficult To Survive As an Elementalist

Hey there,

I'm fairly new to PoE and been playing for less than a week now. I went Elementalist despite people telling me to go boring but strong necromancer.

I feel like I do decent dmg (but prob not) it's just that I end up facetanking so many things. My resistances are capped and I have about 4-5K split between HP/ES.

I'm currently doing T1-T3 maps and most elites and metamorph destroy me and I lose lots of XP.
I switched out lightning golems for 2 stone ones which seem to help slightly and working on getting more ascendancy points to have 3 golems.
Also using molten armor and Discipline aura (and Wrath aura for more dps).

My skill tree is just pretty much all the lightning/ele nodes and whatever ES/HP nodes I can find. Starting to get a couple leech nodes now too so they compliment my ascendancy leech passive.

Are elementalists just weak compared to the other 2 ascendancies and other classes?
Any tips would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Hi there, glad to see you playing PoE. A quick suggestion is giving people a pastebin link or something so people can plug in your character to path of building (pob). You can look this up later, but taking a look at your character page here are some suggestions I'd make:

1. Focus on either life or es, there aren't many builds that can go hybrid without an opportunity cost and lowlife is a different beast entirely. Looking at your gear I'd say you wanted to go the es route so might as well go all in and take chaos inoculation (CI) which is nice for metamorph since there's been a lot of chaos damage recently. Note, going full es means that you want something for anti-stun such as the brine king pantheon or presence/eye of chayula, or other stun avoidance/recovery mechanics. (Edit: for energy shield, I'd say you want around 5-6k es minimum and 7-8k+ to start feeling not squishy, if going a life build, you can probably get away with around 4-5k life if you expect to die and 3k if you expect to die a lot).

2. Get better flasks, if you go CI you can eliminate life flasks completely and replace them with dps flasks (diamond/wise oak,etc.) or defensive flasks (granite/quartz/basalt/etc.). These flasks should have mods such as remove/immunity to bleed/freeze/curse for extra protection. If you can sustain your mana consumption I'd also suggest you swap that for one of the previously mentioned flasks as well. If you focus on life, 1 life flask should be enough with a prefix such as bubbling or seething (for fast/instant life recovery).

3. Good offense is a good defense, I don't really have good advice here, but I'd take out some of the more mediocre nodes on the passive such as ash,frost,storm/shaper/the life or es nodes depending on which path you choose to take. This should free up passive points that you can invest elsewhere. I'd say a good way for you to scale damage is more spell/lightning damage and/or focus on crit multiplier.

4. Gem links, they're not really that great, I don't really play many lightning spells so I can't help you much here either, but I'd probably swap arcane surge to a different thing such as your movement skill and have that proc it. But I will say try to setup more automated casting. a cast when damage taken (cwdt) setup is really key on many builds and you can stick your molten shell/immortal call on there and/or curse/golem. The golem doesn't need to be a 4-link since it isn't your primary damage dealer and the links would be better off used for something else that could contribute to damage such as curses or auras.

That's about all the general advice I can give you, more specific stuff I'll leave to someone else more skilled at crafting builds. You can check poe ninja builds to see what other people do for x skill/y item and it'll give you some techniques that you can put into your own build. This is a double-edged sword though, since it does require you to know a bit about builds to understand why they do a certain thing but trends in builds generally happen for a reason.

Anyhow, hope this helps you and good luck on your build.

Yes, occultist or trickster will end up being more defensive than elementalist, but general idea is:
- get life on every piece of gear except weapon, at least 50-70 per piece
- get at least 150% life from tree
- get your resistances capped, importing your character shows your lightning res is too low
- don't use uniques that aren't necessary for the build to function and don't offer good stats, you can buy decent rares for 1c to 1alch easily (maybe not last day of league but for next league)
- use defensive flasks like granite, basalt, jade or stibnite, use alterations and augments and bestiary crafts to enhance them further
- try to do another lab (after you get more life) and get that elemencer node to be immune to freeze, ignite and shock (you need 3 golems active for this)

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Hey there,

I'm fairly new to PoE and been playing for less than a week now. I went Elementalist despite people telling me to go boring but strong necromancer.

I feel like I do decent dmg (but prob not) it's just that I end up facetanking so many things. My resistances are capped and I have about 4-5K split between HP/ES.

I'm currently doing T1-T3 maps and most elites and metamorph destroy me and I lose lots of XP.
I switched out lightning golems for 2 stone ones which seem to help slightly and working on getting more ascendancy points to have 3 golems.
Also using molten armor and Discipline aura (and Wrath aura for more dps).

My skill tree is just pretty much all the lightning/ele nodes and whatever ES/HP nodes I can find. Starting to get a couple leech nodes now too so they compliment my ascendancy leech passive.

Are elementalists just weak compared to the other 2 ascendancies and other classes?
Any tips would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Dude, you should be able to get about 9 golems with the right equipment and jewels. Just do some trading to get the items you need. I have 9 golems and periodically i'll use many of one golem depending on the circumstances, like 4 ice and one of each of the rest. I do pretty good damage myself too. I'm probably spreading myself thin with all the skills i have and I might thin them out a bit and replace some with supports but we'll see later on. Also, I didn't jump into mapping yet. I'm getting as many points as i can before completing act 10. I'm leveling in labs and it's still providing decent exp at 75. I copied a build off someone on the ladder high up there. Also, Youtube is a good source for some great budget builds. Good luck. Feel free to check my build out on here.