[3.25] White Wind Slayer (League Start/Versatile Budget Build)

Always keep in mind attribute requirements when you make changes to your passives and items.

‣ We need at least 131 Intelligence to equip White Wind. It's ideal to have +20 extra to convert to 2x chance to poison on hit tattoos once you introduce Yoke of Suffering.

‣ We need at least 159 Strength to equip all gems once you introduce level 21 Determination.

‣ We need at least 159 Dexterity to equip all gems once you introduce level 21 Grace. We get a lot of Dexterity from the passive tree but we eventually convert a lot of it with tattoos so be mindful of which bases you're using and how much Dexterity the require.

The rare items used in the "PoBs" section are not particularly great-- this is intentional to keep the budget low and build around items that are reasonable to acquire cheap or even find yourself. This means there's PLENTY of room to grow in that regard. In particular, no mods above tier 3 were used. The most simple way to improve your rare items is to acquire ones with better, higher tier mods. Essence crafting, fossil crafting, harvest crafting, and Rog crafting are some way you can improve your items through the mechanics you might be running yourself. Obviously you can outsource to the trade website for better rares also, but you should be mindful of cost compared to average cost to make an item yourself. CraftofExile is a useful tool for finding the most efficient method to craft an item yourself and you can use this information to get a rough idea of the cost, on average, it would take to make it. Snipe cheap rares for upgrades when you can and work on others. Fractured items in particular can help a lot as you get into higher tier territory and its becomes more and more difficult to target a specific combination of modifiers on a specific base.
In regards to bases, we want hybrid or evasion items in every slot. While evasion bases will lead to higher armour totals thanks to Iron Reflexes AND an easier time rolling suppression modifiers, the dexterity cost can become a challenge when you start introducing tattoos, specifically when stacking the chance to avoid stun tattoo for stun immunity. It's also more difficult to roll socket colours, which can be a big pain for the LS variant with your 6 link. Use evasion bases where you can and hybrid bases where you need to.

There are a plethora of unique items that can augment builds in just as many different ways. There are many many more but here are a few notable options that can be incorporated and how to go about doing it:

‣ White Wind (prices fluctuate heavily based on modifier rolls)
It's the entire basis of the build and we intend to use it for quite a while. Investing a few more chaos for better modifier rolls is absolutely a great option and I always see cheap ones with good rolls throughout the league. High suppression rolls and flat cold damage are the first things we should be going after but all of the other stats contribute to the build. We can opt for a harvest craft to increase crit chance per quality instead of physical damage but I'd wait until you have a good one. Plug in your current rolls and make a search filter for it on the trade website to try to snipe better ones cheap when you see them.

‣ The Taming (30-35c base price)
Get a cheap average rolled one initially but eventually investing in one with base 40% "increased elemental Damage with hits and ailments for
each type of elemental ailment on enemy" and using turbulent catalysts for 20% quality is a great way to increase damage. This build doesn't have any natural sources of fire damage but we do have crit so one source of fire damage to attacks will give you the condition to have another source of elemental ailment to benefit from. If you get this before Ralakesh's Impatience you'll have to drop Berserk to still fit Enduring Cry.

‣ Yoke of Suffering (1 divine base price, week 2)
This one is particularly expensive earlier in the league so it may be beneficial to wait until week 2 when prices come down. Same as with The Taming, start with a cheaper variant and work your way towards one with 10% increased damage for each type of ailment you have inflicted on them" to scale damage. You can't augment this stat with turbulent catalysts, though, as it isn't specifying "elemental" ailments but rather all ailments. This means we can continue to scale it with things like poison and bleed.

‣ Ralakesh's Impatience (5 divine base price, week 2)
Another item that's quite expensive week 1 and comes down to a more reasonable price for week 2 so it may be worth waiting a bit. You're going to sacrifice +1 max frenzy/endurance charge and a good chunk of armour by dropping Darkray Vectors but the ability to constantly have max charges for all of them is invaluable for all of the content that matters. The modifier rolls aren't particularly important so a cheap one works quite well. This will also enable you to change the passive tree a bit, away from frenzy and endurance charge generation freeing up more points and more useful nodes. Additionally, it allows you to drop Enduring Cry entirely.

‣ Lethal Pride (prices fluctuate heavily based on modifiers)
This one is a bit tricky but thankfully there's a great tool to help determine which seeds will provide which nodes. You select a specific timeless jewel (Lethal Pride for us) and select a specific conqueror (Rakiata for us). Next, click select stats and then when you click on the add stats box a drop down will appear. From here, you can see a list of what mods can spawn for that type of timeless jewel with that conqueror. The mods we value most are double damage, rage on hit, crit multi, and % increased max life. How far you want to lean into one particular mod is up to you but I'd recommend at least one source of rage on hit to start. This jewel will also provide a lot of strength which will alleviate attribute issues. The simple explanation is the more good nodes you want on one jewel, the more expensive the jewel will generally be.

‣ Stormshroud (5 Divine) or Ancestral Vision (5-6 Divine, week 2)
Two jewel options to address elemental ailment immunity with two very different applications. The latter is another option that is quite a bit cheaper around week 2 prices and may be potentially worth waiting for.
Stormshroud will cause chance to avoid shock to apply to avoiding all elemental ailments. Wording is everything in PoE so make sure you're looking at only the mod that specifically avoids shock and no other variant. There are a few ways to obtain 100% chance to avoid shock but one of the more practical ways is a Stygian Vise crafted with Essence of Torment. You will need at least Shrieking tier to ensure 100% when paired with an abyss jewel, which can also spawn the chance to avoid shock modifier and can be socketed in the Stygian Vise.
Ancestral Vision will cause your spell suppression to apply to avoiding all elemental ailments at 50% of the value. For example, if you have 100% spell suppression you will also gain 50% chance to avoid all elemental ailments. This is a bit easier to accomplish than the other option but we still need to adjust the tree and over cap suppression to reach 100%. Again, there's many ways to accomplish this but one of the easier options is too change the annoint to Crystal Skin (fairly cheap annoint that also gives us +1 max all elemental resistance) and fully allocating the Thick Skin passive wheel. This will give us 40% base chance to avoid elemental ailments meaning we can reach 100% with 120% spell suppression.

‣ Headhunter (95-100 divine)
If there was a chase item to chase for this build, it's this one. Arguably the most infamous unique in PoE, albeit overshadowed more recently by Mageblood, this is the premier mapping option for an attack based build. Headhunter causes you to steal modifiers from rare mobs for 60 seconds when you kill them. While stealing more modifiers doesn't refresh previous ones, they can stack with others while they still have duration. It will get progressively cheaper as the league goes on so while not being a good store of value like other options it can definitely propel your mapping and increase your gains.

‣ Quality:
LS and Enduring Cry are our biggest priorities for gem quality. From here, I like Assassin's Mark for a small chance of Power Charge generation and Berserk to lower the CD a bit. All of LS's supports and Blood Rage will add small damage increases with quality. Lastly, the mobility skills will be slightly quicker with quality.

‣ Level 21 Gems:
Getting a level 21 LS is a nice damage increase but the 20% quality is important so we really want 21/20 for it. It's probably worth buying this one outright. Auras are the easiest to get level 21 gems for as the quality is irrelevant and we only need 21/0 gems. Precision will give a slight a boost to crit and accuracy, while Determination and Grace will provide slightly more armour and evasion (more armour) respectively. You can level multiples of each gem on swap and corrupt them yourself to try to save a bit. Sell the fails for a slight return as people will still buy level 20 corrupted aura gems.

‣ Awakened Gems
Awakened Added Lightning Damage is a significant damage increase over the normal version and not very expensive to purchase. You can save a little by leveling it yourself. Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks is another decent damage increase but this one comes with built in elemental reflect immunity for supported skills. It's quite a bit more pricey but worth the investment. Awakened Multistrike is a significant damage increase but ridiculously expensive. I would not recommend this purchase at all for budget variants as there are multiple other upgrades you can acquire that are more impactful for much cheaper.

‣ Tattoos:
There are a wide variety of useful tattoos that can cover many different holes in setups. I won't go over all of them but it's worth checking the different options out because generally when you need a small amount of something to hit a threshold (whether it be resistances, suppression, accuracy etc) and you have spare attributes, tattoos will get you there. Two noteworthy options are Tasalio Tideshifter (convert 10 dexterity to 10% chance to avoid being stunned) and Tawhoa Shaman (convert 10 intelligence to 5% chance to poison on hit). The former allows you obtain stun immunity and the latter allows us to further benefit from Yoke of Suffering by applying an additional ailment.

‣ Eldritch Implicits:
Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds influences allow us to add powerful implicit modifiers to our rare items. Even the lowest tiers of eldritch currency will apply the influences and considering Eldritch Altars are a targeted content for this build we can easily improve our rares with these options and scale them further by using the higher tier currency to generate higher tier versions of the modifiers. Two that are particularly good for us are pierce from an eater of worlds implicit on gloves and melee hits have chance to fortify from an eater of world implicit on body armour as with a specific annoint it will allow you to ignore the far left side of the tree completely.

Cluster Jewels offer a variety of exclusive passive nodes that can range from bolstering existing mechanics to enabling build defining effects. There are many different combination of bases and potential modifiers but we don’t use any mandatory cluster jewels so we can treat it as higher investment DPS scaling option. I’ll give an example jewel and how to go about finding the optimal ilvl to target a specific combination of mods.

Base: 8 socket Large Cluster
Small Passive: Claw/Dagger Attacks Deal Increased Damage with Hits and Ailments
Notables: Feed the Fury, Fuel the Fight, Martial Prowess

With craftofexile.com we can select cluster jewel for base group, large cluster jewel for base, and dagger and claw for type. From here we can see a table of possible modifiers with tier, ilvl required to roll the mod, and weighting. All notables for this have one tier so we’re mostly looking at ilvl required.
Feed the Fury: 50
Fuel the Fight: 1
Martial Prowess: 1
Scrolling through the list of notables, the next lowest ilvl required is 68. So, if we wanted to craft this jewel ourselves with alteration/augmentation/regal, we would want an 8 socket large cluster with claw and dagger base small passives ilvl 50-67 to give us the best chance for this combination of notables.

‣ Stormshroud Lightning Strike:
Level 98, ~10 divine budget, ~3.8k life, ~3m unbuffed DPS (>11m with proper positioning, Tincture, Silver Flask, and Berserk), >50k unbuffed armour (>85k with Granite and Jade Flasks) and capped chaos resistance:
https://pobb.in/S0Ns4FX9mCL5

‣ Ancestral Vision Lightning Strike:
Level 98, ~50 divine budget, ~3.5k life, ~5.7m unbuffed DPS (>24m with proper positioning, Tincture, Silver Flask, and Berserk), ~34k unbuffed armour (>65k with Granite and Jade Flasks) and capped chaos resistance:
https://pobb.in/t-EwrcYKjEyT

The first thing we can look at is the league start environment. This build is very good at hitting the ground running when you start mapping and doesn't need initial power boosts from the atlas tree to start expanding the connected maps and completing maps and atlas bonuses. With that in mind, our initial trees have some very straight forward goals; Jun is the first passives we invest to start getting a chance to improve the crafting bench through unlocked mods from unveiling. From there, we head directly to Unwavering Vision as quickly as possibly because the benefit of 20 extra passives heavily outweighs scarabs for quite a while:
‣ 40% Jun and Unwavering Vision (23 passives)


Next, we can invest our 20 free passives, focusing on nodes that help our atlas progression:
‣ 40% Jun, Unwavering Vision, Map Tier Upgrade, and Kirac (43 passives)


From here, we finish rounding out the nodes that help our atlas progression and add Niko. Around this point you're pushing high yellow maps and into reds. You're starting to encounter mechanics for all of Maven, Exarch, and Eater which are supplementing the map and the mobs/bosses within them. Packed with Energy will give you a substantial stacking character power buff (15% MS, 35% damage, 1% max resists) every time you find a voltaxic sulphite vein in the map. We get Niko in 100% of maps and delve can serve as a valid option to finish levels for the 85-90 range when map bosses and league mechanics start becoming dangerous enough to kill you every so often. I would not prioritize delve by any means, just dip in when you're >1/2 way through a level and finish the level then get back to atlas progress:
‣ Unwavering Vision, Map Tier Upgrade, Kirac, Scouting Reports, and Niko (70 passives, 12 refund points used)
By this point you should have acquired all or most of the unveiled modifiers needed and we can reallocate the points spent on the tree for Jun.
If you don't have enough refund points prioritize keeping the Adjacent Map Drop Chance nodes.



Finally, we add passives to further augment character power with shrines and pick up some Maven passives to give us a chance to slightly speed up progression on the last few parts of the quest line where the number of required map bosses witnessed starts to scale up:
‣ Unwavering Vision, Map Tier Upgrade, Kirac, Scouting Reports, Niko, Shrines, Strongboxes, The Most Toys (102 passives)
Mining Byproducts is optional but it pairs well with the delve exp strategy to quickly catch up your delve stats or you can use the azurite to purchase resonators and sell them for chaos. If you want the strongbox nodes it also gives you a relevant path to the corrupted nodes, otherwise you'll have to path through 2 extra scarab nodes which are cancelled by Unwavering Vision.
The strongbox nodes are optional but give some extra value in your maps and a chance at corrupted 6 links.
Another good option is Essence nodes. You don't have to route far to get Prolific Essence and Amplified Energies.


You unlock a second passive tree at 50 bonus atlas objectives and a third at 100. Personally I like to save both options while focusing on atlas expansion until I have 2 voidstones from Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch, saving the trouble of having to spend a ton of refund points. A lot of content will have a lot higher yield once you can pick a good map base and have access/ability to run exclusively T16 maps. This is an entry level tree for Harvest farming complimented by Eldritch Altars, two great sources of income and gear upgrades that this build can manage well:
‣ Unwavering Vision, Map Tier Upgrade, Eater of Worlds, Harvest, Increased Effect of Explicit Map Modifiers (102 passives)
We want to use 2 socketed voidstones and all favored map slots besides one for Underground Sea. The other favored slot will be Toxic Sewer. These maps are both T16 with 2 voidstones, both catered to boss rushing, AND connected. We prioritize Underground Sea as our map of choice and if you run out of maps run Toxic Sewer to replenish supply. The strategy is the same for both maps; rush to the boss and kill it to deny map boss choices on eldritch altars, clear the map to proc altars, and clear Harvest last with the altar buffs. We prioritize quantity altars but you have to be careful not to nuke your character with too many bad negatives. For Harvest, prioritize highest seed tier first then most valuable seed type, typically yellow > blue > purple.
Try to sell Lifeforce in bulk for divine orbs as the profit is a bit better than selling for chaos.
Expedition is another great option for early currency and gear upgrades. Rog crafting is very strong I just prefer Harvest where I have to stop and make choices much less, which is already an issue with altars but the reward scaling is undeniably good. You can use a tree similar to the Harvest one with Expedition nodes instead.


Finally, I have an example end game harvest tree with scarabs:
‣ Map Tier Upgrade, Eater of Worlds, Harvest, Scarabs, Increased Effect of Explicit Map Modifiers (132 passives)
We want to use 4 socketed voidstones and chisel maps to 20% quality before rolling for Chiseled Perfection. All favored map slots besides one for Jungle Valley and the other for Toxic Sewer, which conveniently aligns with the initial Harvest strategy. Jungle Valley is the premier map choice as the altar mods automatically can not roll boss modifiers due to the map boss being "hidden" until you start the encounter. This means you can play the map as normal and forego the boss rushing tactic entirely.
Crop Rotation is a viable option for the end game strategy. I don't personally use it as its leaning more into the stopping and reading aspect that I like to avoid and lifeforce generation without it is very good. Everything I've read is leading to Crop Rotation being a bit better for generating one specific type of lifeforce while Harvest without it will give you a good spread of all types.
Change which 2 scarab passives you use based on which are most valuable in the current economy. Ambush and Harbinger are selected by default but Essence, Cartography, and Domination all have fairly valuable scarabs and others can be worth a good bit as well.

And an end game boss farming tree with scarabs:
‣ Map Tier Upgrade, Destructive Play + Conquered Conquerors/Remnants of the Past/Vivid Memories, Smuggler's Caches, Scarabs, (132 passives)
For this, we can use our Elder/Shaper/Sirus guardian maps with Maven witnessing the map to produce Maven's Invitations from Kirac. The bosses are the major emphasis of this strategy so we've blocked a lot of content that would slow us down while leaving Harvest and Ultimatum as they both have valuable potential scarab drops, but will still skip that content. With that said, you still want to clear as much of the map as possible without detouring to benefit from Destructive play. 4 socketed voidstones will give a better chance for dropping T17 maps which sell for quite a bit too. You can keep your favored map slots the same as your harvest strat to bolster your map supply while running these.
You can use Orbs of Horizon to reroll shaper guardian maps to the ones you need to proc the invitation.
You can craft on the Maven's Invitation from Kirac's window to scale the difficulty and rewards of the encounter. We want quantity while avoiding making the invitation too difficult.