Welcome back, you filthy Exiles. So, this is going to be a bit of a theory-crafting video. This is not a league starter. Do not play this league start. But yeah, we got cooking with this one. So, alright. So, a couple things we know. There's a new Strength gem that's been added called Crushing Fist, which is a retaliate skill gem. Right. So, basically, you retaliate when you block with your shield and you smash a huge fist into the ground. And that's really cool. So, how can we use this? Well, the Rendor Shield no longer grants level 30 Reckoning. Instead, it will grant what I assume to be level 30 Crushing Fist. Let's just sit on that for a moment and sink in what we can do with that. So, I got cooking with Po and I managed to make an infinite effective hit pool Gladiator. And with the old, we assume Crushing Blow would be like Reckoning 'cause the skill's not actually in Path of Exiles OB yet. Yeah, no, this build is

really strong, uh, infinite hit pool. We just got to deal with the resistances, 90% chance to block, 88% spell block, uh, almost capped reses. And the best thing about this build is this is running the old-fashioned face breaker configuration. Ridgewoods curse, which we can now anoint, uh, face Breakers fourth Val set up with abyssus. We don't need to worry about taking physical damage if you can never be hit, uh, and then basically we run the surrender, which in this case I'm assuming would give us crushing fist, level 30 crushing Fist, and all we really need then is to run a three-link setup, and, uh, the other thing is for those who want to play Cyclone, this uses a cyclone hybrid configuration. We get like 4.6 mil of impal cyclone damage, which is pretty respectable in the end game. So this is more to just like proc MIM and stuff like that, but, uh, basically, yeah, what I can take home from this is if we get crushing fist in this and it

actually turns out to be really cool. The old Reckoning skill gem is procing up with crit and everything else actually. And this isn't even correct cuz we have brittle. $6.8 million dollar uh 6.8 million DPS for just the old Reckoning gem. Not knowing much information about crushing fist, we might actually be onto something here. And uh this build could be off the chain. And just for posterity, 5.3 mil on Cyclone. So this would actually be viable to sort of run through maps and do whatever you want. And in particular, Infinite Hit Pool. We just got to deal with the ailment immunities. And for that, we would use a Storm Shoud and basically stack up all at lightning Elemental avoidance. And we would be immune to all Elemental uh Elemental ailments. We're basically uh dot capped as well, almost chaos dot capped so we don't need to worry about chaos. Uh and then we're also using a fourth valve setup. We have a respectable amount of Life regeneration.

and we would also do leech based on the retaliate skill, and on top of that, we would also be generating rage as we sort of cyclone around and do whatever, and uh, yeah, this would be super powerful. So anyway, let's talk about it. We don't have tinctures in this either, so this is just a really cool retaliation skill template that you could use if you really wanted to play retaliate skill. So yeah, let's talk about the tree. Okay, so first thing about the tree. So Val Cyclone, we basically use Cyclone of tumultuous whatever that is, uh, and then basically we just have like the normal Cyclone version on there. We don't need Val Cyclone. We can use level 21, and that's going to give us a pretty good amount of damage, 5.4 million at six stacks, and that's going to be basically our Mobility skill, more or less, and we can play with that. Um, we can use like, I think, Spore guard boots and stuff like that if we want to. Otherwise, just use

normal boots and use it to proc. Basically, if you wanted to, this build would be designed where you could just run, and it'd be like detonate dead, except with a shield, you just smack everything with shield and kill everything. So basically, we use this to generate rage. We also use this to proc fortify, proc M, and apply some impales beyond that. So in our Shield, which is our surrender Shield, we would have awaken, merely physical damage, pulverizing brutality. Now, I don't know yet if we would want to run one of the new gem that allows us to basically proc more retaliate quicker. Haven't figured that out yet, don't have enough information. Super excited to test this build, and I will be building this as my second build. We'll be doing shield crush first, and then we'll be doing this retaliation build because this looks cool. Um, there is no determination in this build, but flesh and stone provides an absolutely huge amount of damage and damage reduction as well, but it doesn't really affect us.

overall we have an Enlighten 3. This isn't League stus. This is assuming that the builds and running Precision is a must. So we have accuracy. We do get to 95%, but we can cap that out further. This is level 98, so yeah, that's okay. Um, so yeah, and then we have temper Shield. So temper Shield gives us an absolute metric ton of, um, what's it called, spell block. And then on top of that, it also gives us lightning, uh, lightning El immunity or shock immunity as well. Uh, then we would have molten shell on a l t castom damage taken, uh, setup, which would trigger off of the block and life tap and blood rage. We have enough, uh, life regeneration at 500 to sustain life tap and blood Rage with a net recovery of 372. And because when we hit, we block, we generate more Life As We block as well. CU essentially we are as close to block capped as we can possibly get at this stage without removing versatile combatant. Basically, we would be immortal.

so yeah, um, you could also do Immortal Call which would also work on this, or even Steel Skin. It wouldn't even matter because like having armor is a great advantage. If you didn't have armor, I don't think it would actually do anything to the build. Now, it doesn't do anything to the build, so it might actually be better to have Immortal Call on this build, to be honest with you. Because that's going to give you Elemental damage reduction as well when it triggers. So yeah, let's go with Immortal Call. Next, we have Crushing Blow. So this would be added in from The Surrender Shield itself. The Surrender Shield drops from Z's Breachstones. So yeah, they're probably going to go up in price if this is a legit build. And then finally, we have Assassin's Mark on hit with Life Tap so that we're proccing crit. This also helps us generate power charges as well on top of all of that. So yeah, that's really cool.

also, I forgot to mention Blood Rage. As we kill stuff, it will also give us frenzy charges. And we generate endurance charges from running Inexorable on the tree as well. For when we get hit, we generate charges. And I also have this setup so you could just stand still on a delve node and just literally take punches. And it'll do no damage to you because yeah, this Gladiator is just cracked now and is going to be the best ascendancy, to be honest with you. I love Jug, but this dude's going to be off the chain. Anyway, that's it for skill gems. Let's talk about items, okay? So, item setups. This is a really classic way of playing a Facebreaker. So, for anyone who doesn't know anything about Facebreaker, basically, it's this set of gloves here. You get a 700, I think it's like 600 or 650 or 62% to 800% physical damage multiplier if you're unarmed. So, basically, you don't want to have any armaments like unarm means no sword, no

axe no nothing just a shield and your gloves and that's all you need. We're going to defeat the enemies with pure brute force and strength. That's how this works. So and actually thinking on this maybe shield crush might work with face breaker. We'll, we'll come back to that. That, that's definitely an interesting concept to think about anyway. So we have the surrender Shield. Basically, this is The Shield that has all the hands on it from breach. Zof breaches in particular, pretty sure it's zof breach. Basically gives you at this stage level 30 Reckoning. But based on what we know from the notes, the surrender unique Shield will no longer give you level 30 Reckoning. It'll give you crushing fist, which crushing crushing fist is retaliate against a blocked hit by slamming a huge armored fist into the ground in front of you. Now the reason why I'm confident this will work is mainly because when you look up fist right, wherever that is right, H we'll have

to go up new gems new gems new gems. Uh, mil. No, no, that's not it. Uh, new content features. All right, so crushing fist. So basically, basically when you have a look at the other skills like, for example, sword storm, it requires that you, it very specifically stipulates that you need to have dual wield weapons or something of that nature, whereas this is the only one that doesn't say that. And this is the same situation with Reckoning. So I would say this is the substitution with Reckoning. Ignore what's on the PoE Wiki because that, I don't think is up to date yet because it basically says it's the replacement for vengeance, which requires swords. And I don't think that's actually true. I think that's incorrect currently. So basically, from the item standpoint, that's going to get baked into the surrender at level 30. So that's going to be absolutely crazy. You get a 500 armor buff if you block recently, which you will. And the biggest thing, you recover 250 life when

you block, and you're going to be blocking absolutely non-stop now. The way that you get more block coming out is basically cool down reduction, so this build requires a lot of cool down recovery to be able to keep blocking more and more. So Abyssus, this is the other thing because you don't need to worry about actually getting hit with block. You're not actually getting hit, so on this basis, this is a really useful Helm because physical damage taken is irrelevant if you don't take physical damage, you know. So basically, this gives you 123% crit multiplier and flat 40 to 60 attack damage, which is enormous for face Breer builds. Next, I've got fourth V in the setup. This is just like right now B like, but basically every setup fourth bow is the goat of all armor, even on The Jug. Everything armor applies to chaos damage taken from hits. It gives you chaos resistance, life regeneration, ton of armor. It's just like literally the best chest. It's easy.

enough to get the right colors as well so it's right. Now what I'm going to recommend obviously face Breakers. This is a corrupted version. You can get better corrupted versions and this isn't bad for putting your AA gems in. I just put some Titan gaves on as you can see the implicits cool down recovery and also drops brittle. Because this is a crit based build you want brittle and if you're standing over enemies even even better. This is no way like the best boots that you can get. I literally just use it to balance resistances. You could tackle this totally differently. So the other thing that you also need with face breaker builds is ridgew world's curse. The reason being is basically modifiers to claw damage also apply to unarmed damage realistically. Like you could get your anoint and if you typed in claw. You could take these nodes in here and that's going to significantly amp up your damage either one of these two nodes actually. Holy Jesus Christ that is

an enormous so we won't claw a magpie actually on our anoint. So we're actually going to change this on the Fly because that's really cool and I didn't even realize that. So on our Ridge Wards, we then want to change our anoint to claws of The Magpie. Yeah, it gives us another 250,000 DPS. So basically, we got 5.7 mil DPS ton of impale. It's pretty heavy hitting. Um, at this stage, and that gives us also the chance to steal power charges, frenzy, and endurance charges. So if you're fighting bosses, that's going to give you charges, which is really useful. So that's it for the um for the ridgewoods. So outside of that, rid worlds is pretty much the best in socket for uh face breaker builds. So it always has been, always will be. It's probably going to go up significantly in price and also modifies to claw. So basically, any modifies to claws is going to increase your damage with unarmed attacks. Then I've just got some craft.

crafted amethyst rings. These aren't good rings, so you would want like negative Mana cost so that you get this down to like zero. And at this stage, I don't know what the cost of crushing blow is going to be, so we'll f that out. Jesus Christ, this thing 7 million DPS with that's crazy. Um, and then basically on your uh sash, you want to get a physical damage rustic stash. And you could go like for influenced or whatever, but you want cool down recovery. And the reason being is this is what's going to buff up our pinging of our Shield every 5 Seconds. Our Shield's going to go off as soon as you get hit, you're going to recover and then keep hitting away. And this is basically going to keep proing your retaliate skills as far as what I understand about retaliate. And we'll talk about the PO very shortly, uh, this is an in-game more an in-game tree. So we got bottled Faith amethyst flas Diamond.

flask bism flask, and lion rooll. Granite flask as well, um, knockback. So as enemies crowd around you and like delve, your Shield's going to automatically go off and go boom, and it's going to knock everything back, or your fist is going to go boom, and it's going to knock everything back. Theoretically sounds really cool, hope it works like that. Definitely going to have to play this build now to test it. So yeah, this is going to be build number two, uh, natural Affinity, obviously this is our Nature's patience, um, which gives us like huge amounts of defense, and uh, this is going to and double damage, so we get like 1 million DPS off this for standing still and doing nothing. So if you wanted a super lazy build that's going to look ridiculous and be absolutely stupid, then this is going to be it. Potentially if I get this working properly, we could just walk into simulacrums and just like do nothing, go get a coffee, crack a beer, do whatever you want, and uh, and just let

the build play for you um. Then we've got forbidden flame and forbidden flesh, which I know is a bit on the chin, but you want Master metal because you want the impale juiciness off of that, and shield of leap is just there for picking up a shield node. One single Shield node. Do you necessarily need it? Probably not, but you know why not. Actually, you probably don't need that, to be honest with you. It doesn't do anything to the build. Probably ditch that, put something way better in there, or just save the whole point altogether. Bam, there you go. 95 tree, that's plenty achievable. All right, um, so items also basically cluster Jewels. You want to run basics of pain and pressure points. We got to get a crit as high as we can. Uh, I do have a small cluster, so confident combatant becomes useful because we're stacking block chance. So basically what that does is 1% of damage per 1% of block attack.

damage so that's going to be pretty useful. Um, other forbidden flesh and then our large cluster. I did test a number of clusters, the physical clusters, the best battle Harden Force multipliers and multiplier and master of uh Master the fundamentals is the best cluster at this stage that I can find in this build. Okay, so for the PO pretty simple stuff. So we're going to come down on the strength side but not the attack speed side, funny enough. Now you could take nodes in here, this is going to buff you up but also actually funnily enough, yeah, you could do exactly that and you get to like level 99 if you wanted to but you crack over 7 mil otherwise if you don't have the points then that should be good enough for you. Um, and then basically come down grab out of the Gladiator, you want Defiance, it's going to give you block, you want this node in here this a first whatever node you want to put in endurance charges CU we do stack endurance charges on this you go down to

pick up Golems blood. Then we want versatile combatant. It's basically where we get a absolute ton of defense from. So if we were to turn this off, for example, we would no longer oh, no, we don't even need that. Like it's the difference, it's the total difference of 90. Like it's 95% attack and 65 block spell block or 90 and 88%. I'd rather take my gamble with it on. Um, this is going to be the most abused node in the game. So then we want to take the impale nodes because impale is great and addition pales even better. Then we take tudo. This is going to give us 30 life when we block. Remember a shield gives us 250. So we have 280 life on block now and a ton of block recovery. So block recovery is going to be really useful in this build. More block recovery, the better. Um, and then basically we grab the retaliation node. We're running a retaliation build. Makes sense. We grab a

retaliation node. Then increase damage per 75 armor on Shield. So that's just going to give us armor. Then we come up, we grab the revry node and the 12% note up here. Then we'll come back across. We want unwavering stance cuz who wants to be stunned. Then we need Eagle Eye and accuracy Mastery because we basically want to be able to crank enemies. And this gives us neia mil cuz we do need accuracy on this as far as I'm aware. But we'll see how that goes. We're a little dumb so we need hard noxs to uh get our intelligence, our smarts up. Then we come down. We want more impale so we get to as close to 100% of pale as we can with merciless skewering. Then we come down. We'll grab the retaliation wheel down here. So flow the flow of the battle and also cruel retort. This is going to be every fourth retaliation skill you always use critically strikes. So every fourth hit 100% crit and also increased

speed, and we want these two nodes here. We get 30% cooldown recovery, so we got 15% on the Belt, 15% here, so we got 45% recovery. We got another 7% on the, where is it, boots. I'm pretty sure, yeah, 7%. So 45, 52% recovery already. Like the question is, how good is 52% recovery? I'm not sure yet. We'll find that out the hard way probably. Pretty good. And then basically we can come up here. We need Sol of Steel. This gives us overcap, and it gives us. You need about 30,000 armor for this to hit infinite for some weird reason. Now you could choose to not take this, and you have 2900 HP, save the points, level 93 tree, but I like level 95, and I like to have at least 3,000 life. Now I'm not too concerned about life because basically we block everything. You don't need life if you block everything, arguably, like if it's.

defensive enough, and this is why we got to test this. Then, technically, we would be immortal, and we could just have our life reserved and more ORS to throttle our damage. But like, that's really getting into chaos theory level crafting of builds. Then like, are we going to be zhp Max blocking our way through delve just for the ls with like 2 Hp? I actually think that's hilarious, and I'm going to try it. So anyway, um, then we come up, we grab block, the block nodes up here. We also want the 3% Max block here is as the mountain and 1% chance to block spell damage per 5% block attack damage. This is going to increase our spell block chance. So actually, it has no real impact on the build at all. So you could just not use it and put in for Max block there and get 89 and 90%. Otherwise, you could go like crit damage ction, but that's irrelevant because you're not going to get hit. Basically, just get your block over 90%.

if you can, then we want inexorable. This is going to give us um endurance charges, so we can keep in the fight with endurance charges that gives us more damage reduction. And our fourth foul works really well on that front too. Um, then we come back and we grab aggressive, aggressive Bastion. This is going to give us an even more chance to um to get endurance charges when we kill with a shield. Also damage, also block chance as well. And then we come up Juggernaut, we got another dual socket node here. We need um barbarism. It is going to give us plus one to our overcap Fire Res. And we also want skill cost life instead of 15% of Mana cost. Then we may grab up and grab hearty actually. And this is going to get our regeneration up to 673. And that makes me feel better about life. Um, and then basically we'll come up and we'll grab the crit melee crit nodes because fist of um crushing fist is most likely going to be a melee crit build. And then crit multi and then we go into

our cluster Jewel setup. So, battle-hardened Master, the fundamentals Force multiplier, confident combatant pressure points, basics of pain, and Nature's patience which is going to make us super tanky and hit like a truck. Now, Ascendancy, so I don't quite know how this is going to work yet. I would assume Determined Savior and more than skill are the first two nodes because this is going to give you an enormous amount of block, block, and spell block. And then next, you're going to go measured retaliation so retaliation skills become unusable for an additional 2 seconds, 50% chance for used retaliation skills to remain unusable. We're not going to. I'm not sure how this works yet if that's not relevant to this then arguably you could put in like War of Attrition but that's not really very functional for you. Maybe we just keep it in there. I'm not too sure yet. I don't know enough about it most likely it could be really good unsure um and

then we want weapon master. And basically, this really actually isn't going to do much so you could actually take this off. You could put bleed and gr. What does that do total grild as violence bleeding enemies you kill explode. Yeah, you could do that. And then take that off. Combine DPS combine total DPS goes negative. That's really weird. Don't know quite how that start at works anyway. Um, the other thing we could do is war of attrition. Not too sure how this is going to work yet so that's irrelevant there. So, we take that and then that does some weird and wacky stuff there. So yeah, uh, that could work too. So yeah, that's going to just take some tweaking because I don't quite know how that works yet but yeah, uh, then obviously we got the forbidden flesh and FL flame for master of the fundamentals. Anyway, let's talk about configurations next. Okay, so configs. So, Sol lar Sol tahama we're going to stand still 5 Seconds standing stationary basically we're lazy with this build and we're

just going to do nothing. Walk onto a delve node. Let the build do all the work for us. Power charges, they're coming from our stealing of nodes, which is basically this here. All of our charges basically can come from there or inexorable or assassin's mark on hit or uh blood rage. So yep. Fortified, we're generating that with our Cyclone rage. We generate that with Cyclone. Do we have a flask active? Probably consecrated ground, which is coming from bottled Faith. Have we been hit recently? Yep. Have we blocked recently? It's like 90 and 89% blocks, so I'd say we blocked and we've impaled recently most likely as well. Beyond that, I like blood stance just because it's going to be powerful, but if you switch to sand stance, you're still going to do a truckload of damage. So this is going to be for bosses. The other one's going to be for running around Maps. Maimed, you're going to apply that with your cyclone and brittle coming from the

boots. So we got the implicit on the boots, and then consecrated ground is coming from Bottled Faith. No other changes to settings. I actually really didn't mess with this build at all. And then Guardian Pinnacle boss damage. Obviously we can't not do that. And that's basically it for the build. Like, it's really simple. It's like classic OG face breaker. I actually love it. I think it's fantastic. I don't even... Yeah, I've got Flesh and Stone. Flesh and Stone. I did switch out Pride. Flesh and Stone actually works better than Pride by like 20,000 DPS. And in a lot of cases, it's better than determination now too. So I wouldn't be surprised if we're dropping determination out of builds and subbing in a much more efficient 25% manner. Um, reservation AA moving forwards 'cause quite frankly right now it's better than determination the way that this is playing out. Anyway, this is basically the configuration and all this will be in the description below. Okay, so I thought this was a really interesting build.

was going to do a Del Guide tonight, but I am absolutely pooped. Um, so I'll be on stream later. We'll make a slam build. I wanted to do this, uh, because this is probably going to be my second build that I play. And I'll change the name from Reckoning Gladiator to, um, Crushing Fist. U Max block retaliation Gladiator, aka the goated build. Build that's going to cream delve. Um, anyway, if you like this content, don't forget to like and sub to the channel. And, uh, also the Twitch. And there's a Twitter or X account there too. Anyway, until next time, I'll see you guys later. And we're going to do a lot more Theory crafting over the next few nights. But, uh, yeah, have a good one.

90% BLOCK! CRUSHING FIST Facebreaker Gladiator Theory Build | Path of Exile 3.25 Settlers of Kalguur

90% BLOCK! CRUSHING FIST Facebreaker Gladiator Theory Build | Path of Exile 3.25 Settlers of Kalguur