[3.9] Spectral Shield Throw Gladiator, bleed variation. Lvl 100, all contents with ease.

https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/TravisL/NavSNS?i=17&search=class%3DGladiator

In case you can't open ninja

Pros:

If not careless,you just won't die to anything that's not a boss, even bosses most of them are jokes.

Tanky AF, we have multi layers of defense, decent life pool, a lot of armour = molten shell heaven, slow from maim and aspect of the spider, less damage from bleeding enemies, and on top of all that the moneymaker is 75% chance to block all hit damages.

Not just HC viable, this will do great in HC (if you do have HC skills and mentality)

Can take on all contents with confidence in the game, not most, all. Torch throwers with GMP in a T16 hard map? Sure. Monster level 83 delve, you can just swim around, nothing will kill you there. Shaper elder or any abyss/breach/legion/delve boss encounters? No problem. Awaken level 8 Sirus and guardians deathless? That's actually really easy, Cortex? Farm it or even sell service.

It's good against all map bosses, very efficient when you try to complete the atlas and bonus.

Bleed goes around armour, monster armour is a thing now.

Alt tabbing out, taking to syndicate members, answering your phone, sudden DC with many enemies around, you will be very unlikely to die in those situations.

Decent amount of damage,over 1.5mil hit+dot phys dmg against shaper, can't compare to a poison build's peak dot, about the same level as a 21/23 vortex build (by which I mean not using +2 amulet and body armour, then vortex will win)

Getting corrupted blood immunity is very cheap for this build, and that mod is OPOP, especially against Sirus.

The explosion gladiator has will scale on enemy life, higher the map, better the effect, if you can group enemies up well, you can just blow them up all in once.

Cons:

Getting one shot is still a thing, keep that in mind.

It's slow, yeah, it's really slow for today's standard, and this is not like a jugg HOA's slow, I like to say it this way: Bleed build almost has a damage cap, when you get your 1 or 8 hits in (depends on crimson dance) and get the bleed stacks up, that's your peak damage, most melee build can get more damage if they attack faster (and there are many ways to attack way faster), bleed gladiator can't really do that, all you gonna do is refreshing the duration of bleeds and get some attack damage maybe 5% more? Not that much.

Another reason it's slow,em is not because we don't have enough damage, I can still "one shot" a pack in a rare T16 map, the problem is you miss a lot, I can one shot, but more often than not I won't, and had to retrace.

It's not too expensive but not a cheap build either, the damage is heavily based on the shield, and an end game colossal tower shield do cost some, 5-8 ex I'll say, and you have 4 awaken support gems needed, only one cheap ones, so just the shield and the gems? That's 20 exalts.

Because block is a chance based system, it can still surprise and fail you, so the build does require you to move around and use flasks decently well, don't have to be Mathil or anything, but can't just face tank everything. For example, I can try to face tank T16 hard metamorph and prbly only die once in 100 tries, but that's not a 0%, on the other hand, a glass cannon character could nuke the metamorph down every single time, in that sense those builds are much safer.

Can't do phys reflect, like duh. There are hard mods for sure, you can do them ,but expect a little setback: less block, any two of enfeeble/phys reduction/hex-proof/avoid bleeding, monster speed + boss speed things like that.

RT is a personal choice, you can stack accuracy instead and prbly save a couple of points
http://poeurl.com/cJMS

Colossal tower shield, crafted, as much armour as possible, I chose to craft aspect of the spider here, that's kinda a mistake, whenever you do weapon swap your spider aura will drop off.



PSA: the "chance to bleed" mod from crafting bench, is a local mod, will not apply to your SST, aaaand I didn't know that, that's why this Sai exists.
Advancing fortress is a great weapon to cap your block, but a Sai with "dot multiplier" and crafted dot prefix is the best DPS option. Search one with int or chaos res, better both.


Life res, and enchant


-15 mana cost is pretty much a must, on top of that, life and resist.
Craft chance to block so you can get max block chance when you are hit, with advancing fortress claw you can craft additional curse or something to your taste.
Our main link is 4greens and 2 reds, the cheapest way you get that on an astral plate is using vorici's white socket bench on a 3greens 3reds chest, and hope the white hit one of the reds.


Dot multi, life and res. The aspect of spider glove is a great choice.


Mainly for the immunity to burning ground mod. Enchant using leech so I can do no regen map.


Impresence for the curse. Anoint "cleaving", which is from the axe cluster left to maurauder starting area.


Have at least one ring with -mana cost mod, life and resist, and bench craft "global phys dmg" or "increased dmg" if you can, those mods affects all three part of your damage : hit damage, bleed damage and the explosion.


BIS, both offensive and defensive, headhunter won't do much when you are a slow build with a damage cap.

Jewels just take what you can find, global phys mod is great, life is great, resiste is great, int is great. Two jewels are must have item, one is a threshold SST jewel with corrupted blood immunity, the other must have a 5% chance to bleed, which will push your total chance to bleed to 100% without the curse.

SST (corrupt to 21/20)
Spectral shield throw + Awakened vicious projectile + Awakened deadly ailments + Awakened brutality + Awakened swift affiliation + Maim.

Auras and buffs

Blasphemy-Vulnerability
Flesh and Stone
War banner
Herald of purity + Culling strike
Ancestral protector
BTW the slot on the helm, that item rarity gem, used to be a level 3 enlighten, level 2 will do.

It's pretty straight forward, pride's watcher's eye jewel doesn't do much for us, so I use flesh and stone + war banner, which give more phys damage in close range, and less mana reservation. Herald of purity with culling strike is just so good, the sentinels summoned does some damage, and the culling is free 10% more.

Golem
Golems they die a lot if you don't invest, you can't count on them being alive during a fight, in that sense stone golem gives the most when you are not in a fight. If you have confidence you can keep golems alive, chaos golem or fire golem.

Reckoning Because we block.

Whirling blade instead of shield charge, because I don't have a lot of attack speed, shield charge will get interrupted by my left click too often, it doesn't feel good.

Bandits
Oak, but if you have mana problem, or you have trouble cap your resist, Alira.

Pantheon
Major and minor god, all use "the one the right", the chaos ones, because of metamorph.

Anointment
Cleaving, an axe notable, to bleed faster.

Enchant
Helm, SST fires 5 additional shards, must
Glove, whatever, or none
Boots, leech for no regen map, optional.

Not that important actually.
SST gem at 21/20, gives 193-289 phys damage, let's ignore all other added phys dmg, if you do the calculation, 193-289 is about equal to what 1400 armour gives, a max armour colossal shield is about 3100 armour right? So if you use a energy shield offhand with no armour, you can still get 30% of what the max dps will be, to get 75% of this max dps, you only need a 2000 armour shield, which is about 30-40 chaos.

Yes, I did exactly that.

From level 12, start using SST.
Try to buy the threshold jewel ASAP.
At level 30, buy an unique shield, Titucius' Span, it worths nothing, no one use that shield like ever, but it's great for us.
At level 51, try to craft a Girded Tower Shield, 1000+ would be great.
Try to get a 6L, and you know the rest.