[HC SSF 0.4] All-Terrain Titan -- 1h/shield + 2h Hybrid -- Extremely HC & SSF Friendly

Yes, you can absolutely work towards a Giant's Blood version of this build or use shield skills if you want instead or go Avatar of fire with Ancestral Cry. I wanted to keep this build keystone agnostic because in SSF you can not always rely on finding specific gear, and I wanted to maintain flexibility in both build design and playstyle.

The playstyle is very active, mobile, and fluid, chaining together slams, strikes, leaps, active block, and boneshatters in an opportunistic manner.

This is a "jack-of-all-trades" build, so you shouldn't expect that this will be the "best" at any one boss, or mechanic - it is still extremely capable across all content, including pinnacle bosses, to the degree that you will still kill most bosses in a very short amount of time with good weapons, but it is not a specialized glass cannon meant strictly for boss farming and instantly deleting bosses or any other specific content.

The mapping clear speed is not slow even though I have marked it as 3 out of 5. I have given it this rating in a comparative context that considers the existence of things like crit armour breaking herald-chaining Ice Shot, CoC Bloodmage with Vertex/Rathpith/Headhunter/Adorned etc., oil grenade + incinerate, or any other glass cannon / to-be-nerfed builds which specialize in screen-deletion and/or utilize exceptionally rare gear that you shouldn't plan around having in ssf until you do have it.

You can still clear the entire screen with a single Sunder or Boneshatter but you might have to pick off stragglers. If you like, you can take your time to read monster mods, and approach packs strategically and methodically, or you can blitz- leap / run straight into danger, pack-to-pack once you are tanky enough not to care too much about mods and can recognize dangerous situations quickly.

I find the playstyle very engaging and I usually fall into a satisfying flow-state which makes this build's playstyle stand out against others. You get to decide whether to leap in, poke with a strike, lay down a slam, throw in a forge hammer, or raise your shield, all depending on what monster composition and other environmental factors are present. The 1h/2h hybrid aspect brings gearing flexibility which grants the ability to respond to all scenarios, offensively or defensively as needed.

This is a great build to choose as a beginner warrior as you will get a handle on many of the tools in the warrior's war-chest. You will feel tanky all throughout the campaign and you will learn how to squeeze the most value out of your gear and character capability, as this build is structured for you to really feel the impacts from every single incremental upgrade and tree notable and let you see benefits from a wide variety of affixes across all of your gear slots.

The gear highlighted in this guide is idealistic and aspirational. You do not need perfect gear to make the build work and you do not need to "copy" any items here 1-to-1. They are just to show you what "aspirational gear" might look like - don't expect to have gear this good in ssf. If you play deep into the late game you could actually find or craft gear that's pretty close though. Just keep in mind your own drops will be much different. There is flexibility built-in so that the impact from the idea of "you need this affix on this piece of gear" has been minimized and allows for interim solutions to supplement until you find better pieces of gear.

That said, there are a few things to aim for on your gear that are more important than others:

The minimum amount of item armour you need across your chest/helmet/boots/rings/belt/gloves in order to feel tanky while mapping dangerous t15 content is 3500, NOT including your shield, which would add a lot more (Item armour is just the numbers on your gear pieces added up. It's in the character sheet so you don't have to do it manually). Your shield is there to supplement the "base" defense with extra armour, block, and physical damage reduction - the more the better, but you want to make sure that you are capping resistances and getting enough armour without a shield up if you can help it. If you can't help it, there is no shame in using your slams with your 1-hand weapon to make sure you have those defences up. This is part of the flexibility consideration.

You also want a minimum of 75% of armour applied to elemental damage. You can get this on any gear slot(s), just as long as you get it.

To feel SUPER tanky, you'll want to work towards 5500 item armour (before shield) and 120% armour applied to elemental damage. More armour is obviously better, but I find those numbers to be the "sweet spots" in this build.

Shield:
Since we are switching between 1h/shield and 2h attacks on the fly, we want to make the stats that are on our shield be considered "nice to haves", not affixes which will result in our instant death when we switch to our 2hander to slam. That means you want to avoid having stats on the shield that cap resistances or things like attributes that let you use your skills/wear gear. You want to focus on increased and flat armour, and % physical damage reduction the most. Next in line is stun threshold, maximum resistances, and some of the neat desecrated mods. I like the one that breaks armour on enemies you stun after you shield bash them on block. Things like life and block chance are good here too but it will feel awkward to lose life when you slam. Increased block chance will let you take less block in the tree but you'll obviously be receiving a lower amount of armour from your shield.

Some notes:
- Work towards Hulking Form for your first 2 ascendancy points, 15% more life for your 3rd point, and the 50% more armour from the chest slot as your 4th point.
- Assign boneshatter and leap slam to weapon set 1, and forge hammer, sunder, and rolling slam to weapon set 2.
- Again, try not to rely on your shield for elemental resistances. You don't want to be caught not having 40 res to something during a sunder/rolling slam in the middle of a cacophany of monster attacks - you will get chunked if you are not careful. Aim for stats that you won't mind sacrificing when you're using the 2nd weapon set 2-handed attacks. This isn't a dealbreaker, but if you don't do this, you're going to have to be careful using your 2h skills while mapping depending on how much you're leaning on your shield for elemental resistance. You will mostly be leaping around and using mace strike and bone shattering. The 2H skills like sunder and forge hammer can be used from range, and rolling slam should be used with caution - mostly on stunned enemies that can't attack you, or after blocking manually when you have guard from the Vanguard II support gem.
- Getting 4k+ life on this build will involve a lot of high-roll life prefixes on gear and likely some %increased life rolls on soul cores and your amulet. You will feel comfortable with ~3.5k life which is very achievable in ssf even with tier 3 affixed gear, which isn't hard to craft/find.
- You don't need more than the base 26% block on your shield to cap block - use a block rune in the shield and get some jewels with increased block on them. This is really not a passive block focused build, so you don't have to stress too much about capping it, but as always, if you can get 50%+, that's great. Raise shield will always block 100% and I recommend keeping it on an accessible button so you can get used to responding to boss attacks with it. You can interrupt most bosses and rares from attacking at all with the riposted shield bash.
- Get either life on kill or life leech. Leech will work better for recovering life on bosses and if you desecrate the "take x% phys as lightning but take x% damage from blocked hits". Up to you. Could also have both. (the recoup from mitigated phys dmg on the tree will help there as well)
- Same idea for mana. Worst case scenario is you put a mana leech rune on your weapons as a reasonable interim solution.
- Like I mentioned earlier - there is a lot of flexibility and opportunity for interim incremental supplementation in this build that you can utilize while you are "Grinding" in the "Game" for better "Gear". This is going to give you a very smooth experience of "the vision" everyone memes about.
- Alternatively, if you can not find mana leech/mana on kill on your gear and you don't want to use runes, you can temporarily spec into blood magic or take as many nodes on the tree as you need leading up to "The Price of Freedom" with 2h weapon set points, as the slams are really the only thing that will feel like they eat your mana.
- Extra skill speed is a QoL boost as a desecrated affix on rings/amulet, but it's not necessary. The character will be fast enough without the extra boost but it will make a noticeable difference when you can't roll attack speed on your 2hander.
- You can anoint whatever you want. I like to be slow immune and have faster attack speed, and we are usually in the 'have been hit recently' status, so I chose the node that does that. In SSF getting the distilled/liquid emotions can be a process so don't be afraid to just use what you've got so you can at least receive some kind of bonus instead of nothing while you "save" up.
- Be mindful of being shocked, frozen, and bleeding. I recommend the corresponding charms to deal with those ailments. Poison DoT won't do much because it is mitigated by chaos resistance and most poisonous hits, and their subsequent poison magnitude, will be quite small after our significant mitigation against hits. We are ignite immune, and highly resistant to being stunned and slowed. You will not really notice slows unless they compound (ie. you are in a temporal bubble on icy ground while hindered) and even then, it will be manageable. We have 50% reduced effect of curses from a run in the chest, and when you leap slam and make consecrated ground you will have an additional 50% reduced effect of curses for a 100% total. This will help against enfeeble/despair/vulnerability/elemental weakness and you will appreciate it, especially in the rituals that apply elemental weakness if you are not "ele weakness capped". The 50% reduced effectiveness rune will also make you require only 15% ele weakness "overcap" instead of 30% - much easier to reach in ssf. Temporal chains is already mostly mitigated by our huge slow resistance. If you find a 2nd curse rune, you might find it to be a QoL boost to replace holy descent support with eternal flame II support for 8-second ignites on monsters instead of 4. You will lose the life regen with the absence of consecrated ground on leap slams, but it's mostly a "nice to have" - we aren't leaning on it and the 20 life-on-block along with recoup from physical damage mitigation should be enough to keep your life topped up in the middle of packs.
- Atlas tree is specced for XP farming maps to level in HCSSF with shrines. You can do whatever you like here really. Be careful with map mod effectiveness unless you are surpassed the minimums I mentioned earlier.
- I'll reiterate that raise shield is a great skill that will save your bacon. Use it strategically.
- The 50% reduced damage from critical strikes should be considered mandatory at high levels if you don't want to get unluckily one-shot if/when you make a mistake in a map that has critical strike bonus damage. Blade catcher lets us actually take less damage from crits that don't have bonus damage, so you can delay this one as you farm for the essence and get a base started to craft on with it.
- Having 30% of armour applies to chaos damage along with 75% chaos res will make you feel chaos damage immune. If you have the armour/chaos affix, you can get away with little bit lower chaos resistance even in chaos damage maps, so if you are trying to balance gear and resistances and other things, take that into consideration. I would not do this against a buffed boss which already does chaos damage such as Yama or the Riverhold boss. Without the armour mod you definitely need to make sure you have 75% Chaos res. That said, you will also find that a lot of "scary" bosses are suddenly not so scary once you master the use of raising your shield, as you will influence some control over the flow of the fights by interrupting or nullifying their chaos-damage attacks.
- The only map mods I actively avoid are "-X to maximum elemental resistances" when it exists alongside the affix that grants monsters elemental penetration. If one of the mods exists on it's own, I barely notice it because of the huge amount of armour applied to elemental damage. You will be able to do double damage mods or crit mods as long as those two mods are not present together.
- Evasive monsters will give you trouble if you don't have at least 225 extra accuracy somewhere on your gear, or you can just use the Akoyan Club base which inherently has "Always Hits".
- The endurance charges gained from breaking armour on mace strike and boneshatter will let you warcry almost all the time without worrying about the cooldown. The warcry also generates rage. We do not get any rage on hit - by default the only way to get rage is by warcry and by being hit. Usually a few warcries is all it takes. Getting rage-on-hit on a jewel can make this feel "smoother" but I personally don't feel it's that important to strive for.


Combo explanations:

Clearing:
1. Mace Strike -->Infernal Cry--> Boneshatter
- This is a bread and butter combo. You just swing your mace and usually one swing is enough to proc stun on a few mobs in a pack. Following up with a warcry to add damage to your next attack, which is boneshatter, which will clear the pack. Most of the time you don't even need to warcry. It just feels cooler when you do and you'll be more likely to ignite and get the ignite bonus. You don't need to warcry every time, and you can chain packs like this over and over if you want.
2. Leapslam --> Infernal Cry --> Boneshatter
- Very similar concept to the first attack - use leap to proc stun, cry, then boneshatter - however this one is more reliable to proc stun and it also ignites, which gives us bonus damage and armour and max res for 4 seconds. This is usually a good combo to use during sustained mob encounters like ritual and simulacrum, and also just for mapping pack-to-pack.
3. Raise Shield --> infernal Cry --> Boneshatter/Sunder/Rolling Slam
- This one is a defensive action, you can raise your shield when you want if you see you're about to take a hit or use it to instantly switch back to your 1h/shield after doing one of your slams. What it will do is usually either proc stun or stun the monsters, but it will also blind them. From here, decide if you should use a slam or boneshatter - if they're not stunned, boneshatter. If they are, I usually prefer Sunder if there's more than 1-3 enemies.


Burst Damage:
1. Forge Hammer (throw onto mob) --> Warcry (explodes the hammer ) --> Sunder/Rolling Slam
- This is what you'll use for things like essences, erupting Abysses, Shrines, Vaal Platforms, or something that you know you're going to delete in one slam. It's a finisher/burst combo. Can be used to finish off Rares or Bosses too. Sometimes the forge hammer throw is enough on it's own.
- Extremely satisfying to watch a huge Sunder delete multiple packs.

Bossing:
1. Start with Mace Strikes to break armour --> leap slam to consume armour and build up stun --> Re-break armour with mace strike, and continue to build up stun with mace strike + raise shield (it usually takes about 5 seconds total to do this) --> Forge Hammer once stun is procced will permanently intimidate and stun them due to syzygy support gem. If you miss, it's ok, the AoE from the exploded hammer when you warcry will do it too. --> Infernal Cry, as mentioned, to explode the forge hammer --> Sunder. High chance of aftershock and will give them the Sundered Armour debuff to take more physical damage from the next slam--> Rolling Slam. Since they are stunned the 2nd slam gets a huge damage bonus.
- You need to pull the slams off quickly because they're usually only stunned for 5 seconds so make sure you're not too far away when you explode your forge hammer. Stun duration on your 2h weapon will give you a larger window here but it's QoL, not mandatory.
- On +4 bosses I usually have to do this combo twice unless I walk into the bossfight with an offensive shrine buff. Twice takes ~20 seconds. Sometimes one try nearly finishes them off and I just rebreak their armour and lay down another sunder/rolling slam to finish them off. If it's a boss that scoots away or something after it gets up, a throw of the forge hammer does quite a bit too.

As an alternative skill "finisher" setup, you can replace Rolling Slam with Hammer of the Gods, and as soon as you stun a boss, you would call it in, and you'd still have time to give them the Sunder debuff just shortly before the hammer fell and right before they become un-stunned. This is just a preference, and I find that the timing is very tight if I don't also have increased stun duration. I like to use rolling slam because I feel that it's more versatile while mapping and also more forgiving. When you get a decent weapon with everything lined up and lucky with an aftershock + high heft roll, the 2nd slam in Rolling Slam will sometimes outright delete a +4 boss on the first stun.