PoE 3.25 Spectral Shield Throw Build: Scaling, Changes, and Optimization

Spectral Shield Throw build scales from The Shield, using armor and evasion, with a focus on maximizing damage.

### Optimizing Spectral Shield Throw Build for Damage and Survivability
* ⚔️  Spectral Shield Throw and Shield Crush builds both scale from **The Shield, not weapon damage**, which is crucial for **maximizing damage output**.
* 🛡️  Comparing different shield types, a Colossal Tower Shield with **2.5k armor** and a Cardinal Round Shield with **2.3k armor** show similar damage potential, highlighting the importance of **shield base type**.
* 📊  Calculating damage involves considering factors like **Pride aura, Endurance charges, Maim, and other debuffs**, with a focus on achieving **over 2 million damage for comfortable mapping**.
* 🛠️  Build adjustments include focusing on **tier 16 map farming** rather than Essence farming, and increasing maximum resistances to **83-81-82** to compensate for **single-target damage limitations**.
* ⚙️  Passive tree changes include dropping **Suppression nodes** and adjusting block chance mechanics to **optimize damage and survivability**.
* 🎯  For crafting, **dense fossil spam** on an item level 86 Cardinal Round Shield is recommended, while the weapon can be crafted with **alt spam and Regal** for desired mods.
* 💰  The build has proven to be profitable, with the creator **accumulating currency** through activities like Blighted maps and item sales.
* 🔮  An alternative build variation using **Shield Crush and Life Tap** is mentioned, offering **slightly less damage** but **easier gearing** and **different playstyle options**.

Ray class is a cursed land. You have to be mad to settle here. All right in here with an update to the spectral Shield throw build that I'm playing. So if you're following this build guide, I have been playing it as well and like I imagined, it did run into damage issues. That's some of the things we're going to cover in this and how I solved it. Another thing that's important as well that I've sadly seen people been struggling with is that not ever be able to realize exactly how to scale it. And that is because a spectral Shield throw and shield crush build both scale from The Shield, which not everybody realizes. So I did see some people are actually trying to get a better weapon like a fist damage weapon. And honestly, that is something I should have made more clear in the guide. So just as a quick thing, I think what I'm going to try to do in every guide moving forward, even if it seems obvious, I'm going to have like a quick this is how the build scales.

damage CU. I think that's a lot more valuable than not having it, but yes, the armor and The Shield or both scales your damage, and it will use armor and evasion even though the skill gem says or so you don't need a pure Shield to max out your damage. So this is my spectral Shield throw. First, let's go over the shields. So colossal Tower shield with 2.5k armor versus a cardinal with uh basically 2.3. You can see that um it's it's generally the same damage. Obviously you don't have the exact same number or it would be the exact same number, but I just wanted to elay some Fierce there. People are also wondering why aren't we using a pure armor Shield or why aren't we using a pure evasion Shield. I think evasion does go higher, but the next requirement is awful, and honestly for me that's been one of the worst issues to solve on this build, especially with the new base types being so insane and I I I really want to

find a good way to solve that because I really want to use the new it's like 170 strengthen decks new body armor and you can get basically four or 5,000 armor if you have triple prefix on that uh especially if I don't need to use the block on chest. So that is something I want to try to solve but we'll see. I also don't want to spend too much money on this build cuz my build is already doing what I wanted to do which is make a T of currency. I am spamming um blight ravaged maps and stuff like that so you can see I have 48 divines. I've been trying to M all my chos into divines early before they go up in value um and I've been selling a lot of Base types like most base types are between 5 and 20 K per uh and then oils are selling like popcorn and I have found this which and a lot of stuff players are yelling at me this is worth a lot.

more but we don't spend as much as early on Hardcore as we do on softcore, but yes I realized this is incredibly rare. Um, but I'll be happy to get 24 on Hardcore first. I want to cover how do I look up my damage on my build. So the first thing I do is I select spectral Shield throw. I was calculating my damage once and looking at my shield charge. Um, now it will be a little bit different before clearing, which is the main thing you care about, and for bossing, which is the main weak point of the build. And yeah, it definitely is annoying, but first let's look here is the enemy, a boss. Yes, uh, I always put Pride effect to maximum because most bosses I am trying to stay quite close to, as you can see the difference is like 10-15% difference, so it is quite large. Also, remember to always check if your pride is on or not. Um, on my stream, I'm regularly doing a pride check because you don't have a buff in the top left.

cuz it's an aura for your enemies not for you. It is off quite a lot. Other than that, I click on endurance charges. I always keep those up. And then look through here. There's nothing else like. I do have fortify but it doesn't affect my damage, just my tank. And that is for my shield charge. Very nice actually. Are you leeching that is up a lot. I do have that for my glove. And then is the enemy moving, is the enemy bleeding. So you can see that right now I'm on 1.8 million damage and with frenzy charge while clearing a little bit over two, which is honestly quite comfortable as well. A little help for the damage. And this is especially important early when you're lower. You see that I have blade storm with Maim and culling strike. So I always cull the enemy, which is an extra 10% damage. But I also get another 100,000 damage from Maiming the enemy. I never use that on like rares or anything in a map. I just wanted.

on bosses for extra damage. Another thing people have been asking about is uh embu found this chaotic might. It's basically 30% Fizz is extra chaos. So this is just to make my explosion juicier and it is up all the time while clearing. The other one that could be very experimental is Like the Wolf Summit because that should give flat fist which should give slightly more bleed but I think this will be the more impactful one and it's quite cheap. Now what are some things that changed with the build. For the first time ever I don't know why I didn't go for Essence farming and Essence farming is very strong this league but I wanted to pursue gold and then staying in low-level Maps. My workers are I need to figure out union busting or something pick up some tips from Amazon. They are charging me like at some point 177,000 golden hour and I can't maintain that in low Maps so I've actually gone for tier 16 map spaming right uh and I don't really want

to deal with Essences, as you all know who are playing this build, the build doesn't have a ton of single-target. Even now that I have 2 million, I'm like it's not fun, right? Farming seven Essences that I don't want to deal with that all the time. So what I've gone with to mitigate this is I've gone more into max resistances. So, I have 83, 81, 82, and I have dropped suppression entirely because getting suppression gear without fractur honestly isn't that fun. That's why in the last r, we actually have a bunch of suppression nodes to do that instead, but that has a lot more damage, right? So we can afford to miss a bit there. This is a bit of a change I did talk about in the initial video that I would have this for bossing. I've decided to just keep this all the time. The charge duration is really nice, especially for hardcore where my charges aren't falling off all the time. This chance to block this

doesn't really work properly. It does not give as much as PO says it does, so I've dropped this entirely. Uh, I've taken this instead chance to BL expell damage per 5% chance of block attack damage. So I do have 6865 right now. Um, another thing I really did enjoy the anoint of sanctuary early on. It was really nice, especially until you can get Block on chest. I do kind of want to drop block on chest. Don't really know where else to get Block without giving up a lot of points, so that's a bit of a conundrum. My spa block is pretty okay though. Like, it is effectively 9088, which I'm more than happy with right now at least. So I've annoyed endur. I have seven endurance charges. Uh, I've not been able to get a corrupted com sign, and I've not been able to get two because fitting chos resist. As you see, my gear isn't that crazy. A lot of it is like dead suffix.

which is a bit of a pain, but it is what it is. Managed to pick up this really cheap, which honestly I like it for the explosion, and I haven't had a good time getting triple Jewels, so it's virtually the same as a triple Jewel, and I've kept one CER so my explosion is quite nice. I finally managed to drop these. Not I do struggle with um int. I also struggle with decks, but you know could just get both of those. You do have those if you need it. Do remember, and this is in the final version of the original guide too, but do remember you don't need more than 100% chance to bleed, so when you have that, may away from the left or from the right to the left. Other than that, I think everything is identical to the initial build guide. A thing that people started doing was noticing how good Shield charge is for clearing, and I've just flipped it, but you can see here that I've fortify and brutality on my shield.

charge so that is actually giving me 20 fortify while mapping. Actually beefy boy, beefy boy while mapping. I think the only thing that I've got L to is Deens, but even they are pretty okay as I have 837 Net Life regen, and I do have leech too. Pretty happy with the build so far. For crafting your Shield, dense fossil spam is the best, and you do want to item level 86 Cardinal round Shield. Don't know how expensive they are in softcore and hardcore. The base is 50c. I tried playing around with coronating, not had any luck. The weapon is pretty easy to craft. It's just uh alt spam, and then hope you Regal into something like lightning rest or plus one socket of gems, then you can put your pride there. Helmet shrieking greed are still okay, but also like the screaming fire cold and lightning res ones. This I did reforge physical until I hit 8% PDR, and then it's just it's okay. I really do want more armor though. I don't

have that much with everything up uh and you can use a sulfur flask uh instead of gr on softcore but uh yeah have 34,000 armor it's fine for what I'm doing. Titan gloves found these fractured tier one life almost uproll uh. I have Pierce at the moment. I might be having too much pierce with two but it's probably two is probably a good amount. The boots probably the number one thing I want to replace. Amulet managed to get a DOT multi one with regen. Honestly very happy with this ring. This is just reforged chaos uh. I got a rathas coil. I got that early before prices had settled um. You do want to always try to look out for the most expensive things for your build anytime you find a Divine or something early because people take divin to fix their build. I'm actually get it for one. I think it's seven or six Divine now so gone up in price a lot and I've found one as well that I sold for seven Divine.

it's very huge for the build. I do want to quickly explain how Rath does work because not everybody understands it. Uh, it's the same concept for volatility. So let's say that the base damage on our hit is between 5,000 and 15,000, right? The hit that causes the bleed. If I hit for 7,000 damage, right, it picks that number in our range. Then my bleed is ticking with that as the base. If I then hit for 6,000, this is not renewing the bleed but will take over if the first one expires, right? 'Cause it lasts for roughly 4 seconds or whatever. If I now hit for 8,000, it is going to overwrite the and start a new timer, etc. So you are chasing that high hit, right, close to 15,000. Now when we have volatility and stuff, it'll make our lower much. So our DPS would go down if we were hit-based maybe, but we can now hit maybe up to like 25,000. So we're

chasing that higher hit, right? So now we can hit 177,000, 3,000, and then 23,000, right? Uh, so we're chasing the high-end bleed, and that's why things like Raz and volatility such a damage increase for our build. So embu is playing spectral Shield throw as well and is now using shield crush a bit, so I wanted to go over that and what he's doing, uh, as an alternative way. Does have slightly less damage, but it's fine for what he's doing because of the bleed explosion. So he has shield crush, and he is using life tap. So the benefit here is that gearing can be really hard, and he has purity of elements as his aura, so he manages to fit purity of elements and pride, and he doesn't really need to invest a lot into reservation. I did look at this, but I felt like I needed to invest too much. I didn't really get it work with just life tapping like that, um, and you do have a lot of extra gems on this. I think you

lose maybe fortify in your Shield charge here, 'cause you do have to LIF tap everything. This is like an interesting thing. Oh my god, he has awaken dead, the elements, the bastard, the purity of elements makes you element immune. It makes it a lot easier to fit. Other than that, I think it's pretty much the same. So definitely need something you can look into. Another thing that's really good for this build, if you can fit it, is death rush, just 'cause it gives you adrenaline all the time and it'll basically boost your explosion and everything while mapping. It won't really help with your single Target though. Um, but it's really nice. That is the main stuff we've changed on the build so far. Hopefully you guys are enjoying it. Um, I hope the single Target is worth suffering through for that incredible clear and fun light Maps. So thanks for watching. So if you like the video but more importantly try to die less than I [Music] do e e e e

Solving all the issues for the Bleed SST Gladiator!

I'm Zizaran, Path of Exile & ARPG content creator since October 2015.
I stream daily on www.twitch.tv/zizaran



Zizaran

Improving the Spectral Shield Throw Build

The spectral Shield throw and shield crush build both scale from the shield, not from the weapon, which some players may not realize.

The choice between a colossal tower shield and a cardinal shield doesn't significantly affect the damage output.

The player is focused on solving issues with the build without wanting to invest too much money, as the current build is already profitable.

Optimizing Damage and Strategy in Path of Exile

Analyzing damage output is crucial, with a focus on maximizing effectiveness for both clearing and bossing.

Paying attention to buffs like Pride effect and endurance charges is essential, while also considering factors like leeching and enemy status.

Experimenting with chaotic might and other options can help enhance damage, and prioritizing tier 16 map spamming over Essence farming can be a beneficial strategy for optimization.

Adjusting Build Priorities for Better Resistance

The focus is shifted from single-target damage to max resistances to deal with Essences more effectively.

Suppression gear has been dropped in favor of more damage, and the build now prioritizes charge duration for better sustainability, while re-evaluating the use of block and exploring alternative options for block on the chest.

The build currently maintains a satisfactory spell block and endurance charges but is still working on improving gear with better resistances.

Tips for Improving Your Build in Path of Exile

Focus on acquiring a cheap and effective explosion for your build, such as a triple Jewel or CER.

Prioritize not having more than 100% chance to bleed, and consider using Shield charge for clearing, while incorporating fortify and brutality.

Aim for a high life regeneration and leech, and consider dense fossil spam for crafting your Shield.

When crafting your weapon, use alt spam and hope to Regal into bonuses like lightning rest or an additional gem socket.

Experiment with different helmet options for the best results, and prioritize increasing your armor.

Discussion on In-Game Equipment and Strategies

Players can use a sulfur flask instead of a granite flask for softcore, with 34,000 armor being sufficient for the player's current activities.

The player has found valuable items like Titan gloves, a DOT multi amulet, and Rathas coil, which have significantly benefited their build.

The player also explains the working concept of Rathas, emphasizing the importance of chasing a high hit for optimal performance.

Analyzing Changes in the Spectral Shield Throw Build

The player is now focusing on high-end damage and incorporating shield crush for its bleed explosion, sacrificing some damage for this effect.

By using life tap and purity of elements, they are able to manage their gearing and reservation more effectively.

Additionally, the use of death rush is recommended for a constant adrenaline boost during mapping.