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Breaking Down The Underrated Unique In Path Of Exile 3.24 - Brine Crown

Jun 05, 2024

Here I’m going to talk about the under-used unique item in Path of Exile, Brine Crown, and talk about how it works and interacts better with other items in the game, especially with the recently added Ascendancies and new unique items.

Brine Crown is a unique item introduced by POE Kalandra League, and synergizes well with both Melding of the Flesh and Aegis Aurora.

To be honest, this unique helmet hasn’t been used very well in a few seasons. While it may not be a particularly interesting item overall, it has a lot of great stats that will definitely make it more frequently used in POE 3.24 and beyond!

Breaking Down The Underrated Unique In Path Of Exile 3.24 - Brine Crown

Brine Crown

Although it’s only used by less than 25 characters in Necropolis League, many players don’t consider it a forgotten unique, perhaps because the item doesn’t have any super interesting modifiers, but is just a solid unique item.

Brine Crown is a core drop unique item. According to crowdsourced drop data for POE 3.23 Affliction League, this item appears to be a Tier 1 Unique, so you won’t see too many of these outside of high-end Magic Finds.

Modifiers

Let’s take a look at the modifiers on Brine Crown: Increased Armor and Energy Shield by 240% to 300%.

POE 3.24 Brine Crown

Armor & Energy Shield

You’ll immediately notice that this item has unusually high Armor and Energy Shield for a helmet, especially considering it’s a Hybrid Base with a good modifier roll and 30% quality.

Besides the excellent base, Armor on this helmet can almost go over 1,100, and Energy Shield can go up to about 160, which can greatly increase your survivability.

Additionally, it has quite a bit of defense, which is exactly the theme of Brine Crown. It’s a completely defense-focused unique item, and it has a lot of advantages in defense.

Max Life

Besides the massive Armor and Energy Shield, there is a really nice life roll here, which is an increase of 80 to 100 max life.

In fact, GGG often talks about creating new unique items that are both powerful and interesting. Sometimes they do something new that we haven’t seen before, but usually these items have no life modifiers at all, however Brine Crown is not one of them.

Max Cold Resistance

It then also increases the maximum cold resistance by 3%. This modifier was actually only added to the item in POE 3.19 League patch. It replaces the 5% cold damage reduction modifier that Brine Crown previously had, plus the 3% max cold resistance is a great modifier in itself.

Cannot Be Frozen

Next up is there Cannot be Frozen modifier, which is another very useful stat. Ironically, this modifier may save you from using Soul of the Brine King Pantheon Power, which gives you a 100% chance of avoiding being frozen. Once you upgrade it, you can use a different primary Pantheon Power.

Given the potential use cases for Aegis Aurora mentioned earlier, you might be using Tempest Shield to boost your spell blocking. In this case, you’re already immune to Freeze and Shock, but you can use Betrayal Boost modifier to address Chill issue.

Chilled Ground

The last Brine Crown modifier of note is: 15% chance to create Chilled Ground when Hit with an Attack. This is a fairly unreliable modifier, I have to say, mostly because it’s thematic, but it will provide some defense against melee monsters when triggered, slowing their action speed by at least 10%.

It’s also worth mentioning that Chill inflicted on monsters by Chilled Ground is never considered being inflicted by the character, meaning that even if you use Secrets of Suffering, Leadership’s Price, or other mechanics that prevent you from inflicting Chill, you can technically chill a monster with Chilled Ground created by Brine Crown.

Melding Of The Flesh & Aegis Aurora

Surprisingly, Brine Crown has become much more useful thanks to the presence of Melding of the Flesh. This Unique Jewel makes your elemental resistances capped by your highest elemental resistance, allowing you to scale a single maximum elemental resistance to increase your defense against all incoming elemental damage.

POE 3.24 Melding of the Flesh

Also, this is a good time to introduce Brine Crown’s best friend, Aegis Aurora. This unique shield pairs perfectly with Brine Crown and Melding of the Flesh, and provides another 5% of maximum cold resistance. When combined with Brine Crown, this gives you 4% of maximum elemental resistance and -4% of maximum resistance.

You can also continue to scale your maximum cold resistance with something like Purity of Ice or Eldritch Gloves Implicit modifier.

But the synergy doesn’t stop there. Because Aegis Aurora also provides a decent amount of Armor and Energy Shield, and it will enable both of these stats through its unique modifier, Recover Energy Shield equal to 2% of Armor when you Block.

Additionally, Brine Crown and Aegis Aurora provide a foundation for armored characters, and their investment in blocking makes your Energy Shield a more powerful defensive layer, especially in the face of incoming blows, where you’ll be blocking more frequently and thus restoring a large amount of Energy Shield.

This combination is especially powerful for Necromancers using Mistress of Sacrifice Ascendancy. Because these setups enable meaningful attack and spell blocking for a fairly negligible investment in POE Currency, and you get a lot of restoration from Aegis Aurora.

You may also consider Glancing Blows, a keystone that lets you take 65% more block damage but doubles your chance to block attacks and spells.

Overall, Glancing Blows will let you take more damage, but it will also make Aegis Aurora’s recovery more consistent, which is especially useful in mapping environments.

One thing that should be noted about the max resistance modifier of Brine Crown and its use with Melding of the Flesh is that Brine Crown does not provide any actual resistance stats. This is a slight drawback that will put more pressure on your other equipment slots.

POE 3.24 Aegis Aurora

Why Is It Forgotten?

As I mentioned before, Brine Crown is used by less than 25 characters in Necropolis League. So why isn’t it picked up more often?

Honestly, I really don’t have anything bad to say about this unique item, the real reason it isn’t used too much is that there are modifiers or other unique items that must be used on the helmet, which simply can’t be replaced in certain builds. And the loss of these stats means the loss of an aura or a significant drop in physical damage reduction.

There’s also the fact that this helmet does not have any spell suppression, nor any evasion, so it will also prevent you from using Evasion Mastery to get 15% spell suppression.

But honestly, Brine Crown is still a significant item, especially when paired with Melding of the Flesh and Aegis Aurora, so I will never be surprised to see more builds using this item in the future!

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