Reviving LiftingNerdBro's Ancestral Warchief Champion in Hardcore Harvest

(Video Version of this Post)

Yo, what is up guys. Victor here. So over the past week, I’ve decided to roll a new character in Hardcore Harvest. However, when it came down to deciding what I wanted to play, there weren’t many builds that I was interested in at the time, beyond my previous Summon Skeletons build. After some thinking, I remembered there was a build that I once played and really enjoyed back when I first started playing Path of Exile. And this was LiftingNerdBro’s Ancestral Warchief Champion.

LiftingNerdBro was one of my favorite Path of Exile content creators back in the day and I really got excited over the notion of testing out an old build that I once enjoyed. After I had done some various tweaks in Path of Building to integrate this build into Harvest, I was ready to start my first Hardcore character of the league. Starting out in Hardcore was not too difficult with this build since I could just level to Act 3 by using Ground Slam (which I later changed into Sunder) and Ancestral Protector. Once I reached Act 3, I allocated the Ancestral Bond Keystone passive, and switched over to using Ancestral Warchief for the rest of the Acts.

Luckily, I was able to purchase a 4-link Edge of Madness at the time which made leveling a lot smoother since I didn’t need to focus so much on upgrading my weapon and could focus entirely on upgrading my gear for survivability. By the time I reached Blood Aqueducts, I had 5-linked my Edge of Madness by taking advantage of the Harvest mechanics, and was well on my way to reaching the mapping stage. After farming out Blood Aqueducts for some time and overleveling my character to about level 70, I continued onward with the Acts. When I reached The Quarry, I decided to start farming out T1 seeds by spamming instances in order to sell the seeds for an Exalted Orb and purchase upgrades. Little did I know that the TFT discord for Hardcord Harvest trades at this point was slow, so I decided to just use up however many of my seeds I needed to cap my fire and cold resistances before I moved on. I didn’t have quite the patience to cap lightning resist too so I just ran a Topaz Flask until I reached maps.

By the time I had reached maps and got some T1 maps under my belt, I had around 15 chaos to my name and was able to purchase some rings and amulets that capped all my resistances and provided me with the necessary dexterity to level my skill gems. So that is about how far I’ve gotten with this build over this past week. I definitely could have progressed at least to yellow tier maps, but because I was putting more of my focus into constructing my Pure Phys Skelemancer guide, I couldn’t pour as much time into furthering this build.

In terms of what I thought and how I felt about this build, I definitely feel that it is Hardcore and even Hardcore-SSF viable. Leveling was a breeze because of the Edge of Madness that I got, but could also have been easily done with a high physical-dps, rare two-hander. The survivability of this build is also phenomenal with the permanent fortify obtained by the Champion Ascendancy, and the 100% chance to Taunt that effectively turns your Warchief Totems into Decoy Totems as well. I have always been partial to totem builds as they were among the first builds I’ve ever played when I first started out in Path of Exile, and will always hold them near and dear to my heart.

However, due to the market in Hardcore Harvest not being quite as fast and abundant as the market in Softcore Harvest, I quickly grew tired of having to progress a brand new atlas and gear up a character enough to do so without dying. As things are right now, I think I may be retiring from this endeavor in Hardcore, and returning to Softcore. It’s just much more satisfying to me to be pushing out more content and potentially new builds in Softcore since I already have substantial progress made in that league, and not needing to dread the process of spamming whispers to 50 people before I’m able to settle on a trade to buy a half-decent upgrade.

I hope my recount of my Hardcore Harvest experience can shed some insight on how the league is, and hopefully, is able to help people recognize the differences between Softcore and Hardcore leagues in Path of Exile. Thank you so much for reading, and as always, don’t forget to check out my next thread whenever I post it, which will probably be on my next build I’m making in Softcore Harvest. See ya.