Marauder Righteous Fire Juggernaut T17-T18 Map Build - Perfect(Affliction)

Righteous Fire is a skill that sets you and everything around you on fire, dealing burning damage over time. It uses your maximum life to scale its damage, so it’s very important to have a large life pool. The damage done to self can be overcome with enough max fire res and life regen.

With good gear you can get up to around 10k life (12k with legacy Kaom’s) and 4k net regen.

Righteous Fire is your main damage dealer. Turn it on when you enter a map, and then Shield Charge into packs, burning them to ash. 

When you SC into a mob, it can proc Elemental Equilibrium on that mob, reducing its fire resistance. There's also a chance that Elemental Overlord procs, increasing your damage against everything for several seconds. It's very important to understand how EE works, or it might fuck up your damage. You can read about it in "EE_and_EO" section below.

Summon Storm Brand when fighting bosses or tough rares, it will trigger EE and EO automatically for you. Then channel Scorching Ray, while the enemy is standing in your Righteous Fire. It will reduce its fire resistance, and deal some extra damage.
Vaal Righteous Fire can be used to boost your damage. Once activated, it will work alongside your regular RF, burning everything around you for a few seconds. It deals about three times as much damage as the regular RF. I recommend saving it for bosses, since that's usually when you will feel like your damage is lacking. It can also be used on Breaches, Abysses, Harbingers, and Essence monsters. 

Pros_and_Cons 

Righteous Fire builds are most well known for their survivability. 8k-10k life pool combined with a few thousand life regen and 9 endurance charges makes you quite tanky. Allowing you to complete every encounter the game has to offer with relative ease. The downside is that single target damage is mediocre in toughest encounters. The fights are easy, but long. Having said that, pretty much everything below t16 dies quickly.

Degeneration from Righteous Fire is hard to counter early on, forcing most people to level with other skills and then switching to RF in late 60s.

It's not a good league starter. The build is pretty cheap to start, but quite expensive to take to a decent level. Without a significant investment, of about 30ex, the build is just ok. Just to get into red maps you’d probably need to invest around 5-10ex.

Survivability 9/10
Clearspeed 7/10
Single-target damage 6/10

Since this build relies heavily on regen and resists, there are a few mods that should be avoided: 

no reg - deadly
elemental weakness - dangerous/deadly if not overcapped
reduced max res - dangerous

reduced regeneration – dangerous

EE_and_EO 

Elemental_Equilibrium 

Elemental Equilibrium is a keystone passive skill:

"Enemies you hit with Elemental Damage temporarily get +25% Resistance to those Elements and -50% Resistance to other Elements."

For us to take advantage of EE, we must hit the enemy with cold or lightning damage. That will reduce its fire resistance by 50% for 5 seconds. Hitting an enemy with fire damage will give it fire resistance, which is bad for us. We deal fire damage with RF and SR, but they don't hit, so they won't trigger EE.

To proc it, we use Shield Charge during the map, and Storm Brand on bosses. SC is an attack skill, that only deals physical damage, so we need to get "adds cold/lightning damage to attacks" affix(prefix) on our gear. It can roll on gloves, amulets, rings, weapons, and abyss jewels. SB already deals lightning damage, so nothing else is required for it to work.

WARNING: Make sure that none of your items have added fire damage to attacks or spells on them. Some boot and glove enchantments add fire damage to your attacks or proc skills that deal fire damage, so be careful what you put on your items.

Mouseover your skills that hit, to make sure that they deal cold or lightning damage, and not fire. If using Pyre rings, you also can't have cold damage. Physical damage is fine.


Elemental_Overlord 

Elemental Overload is a keystone passive skill:

"40% more Elemental Damage if you've Crit in the past 8 seconds."

RF and SR can't crit, so Shield Charge and Storm Brand is used to trigger this effect. It's recommended to increase their critical strike chance to make them more effective. We do that by linking Shield Charge and Storm Brand with Increased Critical Strikes Support gem, it more than doubles their critical strike chance.

Gear_Breakdown：
1. You don't need to overcap your resists to deal with Elemental Weakness. Nine endurance charges will give you an extra 36% resistance. A flask with “Immunity to Curses” mod will protect you until you get your charges up.
2. Make sure that none of your items have added fire damage to attacks/spells on em. And try to get a single "adds cold/light damage to attacks" mod. No cold damage if using Pyre rings. Watch out for Glove/Boot enchantments with fire damage.
3. Penetration and Leech don't work with RF and SR since they don't hit.
4. % increased damage sources that affect Righteous Fire are: Damage, Fire Damage, Burning Damage, Damage over Time, Area Damage, Elemental Damage. Even though RF is a spell, % spell damage has no effect on it. Everything mentioned, except for % area damage, affects Scorching Ray.

5. If you followed the recommended passive tree, these are additional attribute requirements that you might need to meet:

+1 int for level 20 Scorching Ray
+5 int for level 21 Scorching Ray (recommended)
+(0-60) dex for Faster Attacks (optional)
+16 dex for level 21 Stone Golem (optional)
+25 dex Phase Run (optional)

+60 dex Swift Affliction (optional)

Basic items:
Forbidden Taste
Chemist's Ruby Flask of Warding
Dying Sun Ruby Flask
Rumi's Concoction Granite Flask
Blood of the karui
Blood of the Karui Sanctified Life Flask

Required Gears:
Weapons: Torment Cry*2 or Dire Gnarl Karui Sceptre and Torment Cry
Gloves: Damnation Clutches Sorcerer Gloves
Head: Behemoth Shelter Fluted Bascinet
Foot: Torment Pace Sorcerer Boots
Amulet: Xoph's Heart
Chest: Loreweave
Belt: Bramble Twine Leather Belt
Ring: Kaom's Way*2