Explosive Trap Trickster was my starting build in the last league. We’ve even enhanced our early builds with new Gem Quality in the upcoming new league. Let’s take a look at Affliction League’s impact on the damage aspect of this build.

Skill Itself And Buff

Our skill of choice is Explosive Trap. This is a trap-throwing spell that creates multiple explosions when triggered. It converted physical damage it deals to fire damage.

We got buffs on this side as they removed enchantments from the game and put Explosive Trap Helmet Enchantment into Gem Quality. So our new Gem Quality will cause our Trap to cause 2 smaller explosions, which is a very nice buff.

All explosions can hit the same enemy, which is where our DPS and Trap numbers come from. When you view POB, you can set the number of explosions that hit the target. I set it to an average blast since most enemies have a small hit range.

Scaling The Damage

Builds can now use 2 curses due to the extra curse nodes on the tree. Assassin’s Mark increases your critical hit chance and critical hit damage, while Flammability reduces enemy fire resistance. We apply this to the single-button Arcanist Brand. If our enemy triggers Trap, we can easily generate Power and Frenzy Charges.

We also give Trickster an additional 2 max Frenzy Charges so we can have 5 Frenzy Charges. And we paired it with Charged Traps Support to make our trap throwing as fast as possible.

Also, because the mana cost of our Trap is very expensive, we will need to use Mana Flasks until the mana cost of our Rings and Amulet is reduced.

Which New Ascendancy To Choose?

With Affliction League, we get 3 new Ascendancies. Let’s start with beginner friendly.

Warden of the Maji is the first node worth considering. You can get this very early. It allows you to get Elemental Resistances easily. Because there is a mod: if there are no gems in your helmet, all elemental resistance +50%.

I think it might be worth taking before resistance gets capped later. It’s also worth considering boots without gems, as you’ll also move 30% faster.

Second, when you have better equipment, you can switch to Wildwood Primalist. With this, we can get additional inventory slots. This is very useful early in the game and even later in the game. You can also insert charms into your Ascendancy tree. Works just like Sanctum League’s Relic.

Of course, you won’t get rare items in the beginning, but it gets easy after that. This depends on the charms and rarity of the mod.

The third Warlock of the Mists. I think this wouldn’t be good for us since we already have 2 curses in the build so it would be difficult to accommodate another curse in our build. So I think overall this is useless for this build most of the time.

Defensives

On the defensive side, we use Grace Aura to increase Evasion rating so that monsters’ normal attacks or projectiles won’t kill us.

Because we use Grace, we can use Ghost Dance Keystone. When we take a hit, we regain 3% of our Evasion rating as Energy Shield, and we can do this 3 times in a row before the stack recharges.

When you open POB, you’ll see that we don’t have any physical reduction in the build, which is not a problem. Because we have more than a 70% chance of avoiding enemy attacks, and we have enough Energy Shield and Life pool to withstand larger blows.

I played this build last league and completed my Atlas, even beating all the endgame bosses without armor on my character.

Now we are nearly untouchable by physical attacks, and the only danger left to us is spell damage. But we have a solution, which is to use Spell Suppression on Trees. We have 84% suppression from the trees alone, so the remaining percentages are easily achievable.

At the beginning of a league, we rarely have enough POE Currency to emphasize items. Therefore, we chose Trickster. So we have access to a very interesting node, One Step Ahead, which slows down the enemy’s movement speed. If we’re paired with Summon Skitterbots, enemies will move at a snail’s pace, giving us plenty of time to react.

Items

Because the league has just started, we cannot get rare items on the first day of the league. Only one item is necessary for this build, Nycta’s Lantern. This is a very sturdy item. For its price, it’s pretty cheap, requiring only 5 Chaos Orbs, but it can take you to Red Maps and beyond.

Also worth mentioning is our flask. Since we have to use Mana Flasks, this is the easiest way to maintain our mana. Since Trickster doesn’t have high health regeneration like Saboteur, we can’t use Lifetap Support and retain all our mana.

You must install this mod on Mana Flasks. It does not remove the effect when unreserved mana fills up. You still gain mana when your mana bar fills up, and you can spam your traps without issue.

Passive Tree

The passive tree is being refined, but in the early levels your major goal is to distribute Assassination, Saboteur, Will of Blades, and Expeditious Munitions.

In addition, Snowforged node is not to be missed. It masters random elemental bonus damage with a 3% chance to deal 300% physical damage on hit. I think it’s really worth it. Because our traps also cause physical damage, and the traps will explode many times. So this is a big damage increase for us.

Ascendancy

We use Trickster as Ascendancy class.

• In the first lab: Use Swift Killer to add extra Frenzy Charges.
• In the second lab: One Step Ahead. This will increase your movement speed. So you’ll move faster and throw traps faster.
• In the third lab: Polymath. From this point on, we get more damage parts that others don’t apply to us.
• In the final lab: Heartstopper. This is our loop defense part.

Hopefully, this guide to build Explosive Trap Trickster will help you get off to a better start in Affliction League. Have a great day!