Welcome to ImTheWinningest’s Hollow Palm max block Cyclone Gladiaor build guide. This build features very high damage, excellent survivability, and moderate but very smooth clear speed on a modest budget of 8-9 Exalted orb. It easily clears all content in the game including all twenty waves of the Simulacrum in Delirium league and is excellent for farming tough Delirium content.
ImTheWinningest’s video has more information on the Hollow Palm Max-Block Gladiator build. He also shared the Path of Building which you can use to browse all the detail of this character:
Hollow Palm Technique
You count as Dual Wielding while you are Unencumbered
60% more Attack Speed while you are Unencumbered
14 to 20 Added Attack Physical Damage per 10 Dexterity while you are Unencumbered
Unencumbered: Being unencumbered is the state of not having any main hand item, off hand item or gloves equipped.
The Hollow Palm Technique keystone is provided by a new small unique cluster jewel called “One with Nothing”. The main goal of the build using this keystone is to stack a very large amount of dexterity to gain a maximum amount of physical attack damage which will be covered in greater detail in the gearing and passive sections.
This build doesn’t require any other unique items to function at a basic level, but there are several unique PoE items that provide very strong bonuses:
Unique Items
Cyclopean Coil Leather Belt
The first Cyclopean Coil Leather Belt that drops from the Elder. This belt provides excellent life and up to 15% increased attributes which can be increased to 18% by using Catalysts. Additionally, it provides freeze immunity when your dexterity is higher than your intelligence, meaning it is not necessary to use a flask suffix for freeze immunity.
The next two helpful unique items are Lion’s roar and Rumi's Concoction flasks. Lion’s Roar provides a large Melee physical damage multiplier and Rumi's Concoction provides up to 20% chance to block attacks which allows us to reach block cap when combined with the Gladiator ascendancy and our passive tree choices.
Finally, there are two unique jewels fit this build very well. The first is the Fluid Motion jewel which converts allocated strength within a large radius into dexterity as well as providing up to 24 dexterity by itself. As you’ll see in the passive section, proper placement to this jewel can provide a very large amount of dexterity. The other unique jewel that can be helpful as a Watcher’s Eye with any of the pride modifiers. I went for a very cheap one that simply makes hits intimidate enemies while affected by pride.
Other Items
The rest of the gearing on this character is extremely simple. You’ll want to cap out your elemental resistances, get enough intelligence to bring your total to 111 to use max level intelligence support gems then stack as much dexiterity and life as you can cram in.
One downside of this build is that based on the inability to fill three gear slots to meet the requirements for being unencumbered, it is very difficult to fit in any chaos resistance. In addition to the unique flasks mentioned previously, I recommend using Catalysed Eternal life flask of Staunching with a Silver flask of Warding and a Quicksliver Flask of Adrenaline.
Passive Tree
Now we will briefly review the passive tree for this character. I recommend checking out the Path of Building link to take your time with reviewing and tweaking the passive tree to your likes.
We are starting as a Duelist since we are eventually going for the Gladiator ascendancy. When you are starting this character, I recommend following the dexterity path out to the right side and heading toward this bottom right jewel slot to put in the One with Nothing jewel as quickly as possible. Leveling with Hollow Palm is a complete breeze because every point of dexterity gives you a massive amount of damage and you will just one-shot pretty much everything through the entire campaign.
When you get to a higher level and respec, I recommend heading out the Strength side to the left and up toward the Constitution life wheel when you need the life. And this is where we are going to stick in the Fluid Motion Jewel that was mentioned previously. With the strength coming out the left side here and within its radius, this jewel with a perfect roll gives us a total of 94 dexterity which is really big.
You want to make sure you grab this Proficiency node as you head down towards Brinkmanship and this Impale wheel.
Also, we have the Forceful Skewering node allocated on the left and that is provided by an Anointment on our amulet, and that is the best choice for an amulet Anointment.
Coming through the Duelist area, we get life and head through some duel wielding bonuses, head down through a Frenzy charge for more life in a jewel slot. And this is where we eventually make our way back over to where we started at this jewel slot. I recommend incorporating a large cluster jewel specifically targetting the Deep Cuts passive which gives us one additional hit lasting on our impales which is a nice damage bonus for a notable and you can chain that into the One with Nothing for Hollow Palm Technique.
As we’re passing by, we make sure to grab all of the nice dual wield nodes as we go particularly focusing on the block ones to make sure we can hit block cap. Don’t forget to grab this small Utmost Swiftness wheel as it gives a very large dexterity bonus.
Then we head up into the Ranger Area. Through some more life and some more dual wielding passives that give us more block. Finally, up into the Shadow area to fill out another Frenzy Charge and some more life, and that finish out our basic passive tree.
For the Ascendancy, we have selected the Gladiator. There are numerous ways you could build this character, you could certainly go for the bleed-splosion rather than focusing on defense to improve your clear a little bit, but I think particularly for Delirium league, it is excellent to stack some nice defenses and makes the Delirium content a lot smoother and a lot less stressful.
So, when you are leveling, the first thing you want to grab is Arena Challenger. This will accelerate you through the story by making your move and attack faster, then head over to the Versatile Combatant to get nice spell block to go with all the attack block we are stacking. Finally, finish off with Violent Retaliation which is a nice percentage damage boost against bosses and when you are blocking lots of enemies, and raise your max block chance to 79%, then you can block very very reliably, which is particularly useful again for the tough Delirium content in this league.
For the Bandits, you just want to kill all of them to get two extra passives because none of the individual bonuses do a whole lot for this character.
Pantheon
For the Panteon, the choices are pretty much wide open, none of the builds particularly impact this build in any significant way. However, I chose to go with the Soul of Solaris for a little more extra mitigation against a single target, and I’ve grown fond of this Soul of Ryslatha minor god over time particularly with the Gorulis Will-Thief upgrade, and it makes that life last very potent which is excellent when you get knocked down a lowlife and need to recover quickly.
Skill Gems
Finally, we will discuss the skill gem setups used on this character, and there isn’t a lof of them because you have to ditch 10 total gem slots to meet the requirements for being unencombered.
1. Cyclone – Fortify – Pulverise – Impale – Infused Channelling – Increased AOE (Concentrated Effect)
2. Ancestral Protector – Maim – Frenzy – Culling Strike (Faster Attacks)
We use frenzy to keep up frenzy charges on bosses where blood rage won’t do for us, and the ancestral protector applying maim gives us nice DPS boost both from the attack speed damage and from the additional physical damage taken based on Maim. If you like, you can use faster attacks here to generate your frenzy charges faster at the beginning of a fight, but I prefer culling strikes to get that extra 10% kill when it is crucial.
3. Finally, for our reservation, we use Dread Banner, Pride, Blood and Sand, and we use Blood Rage which gives us frenzy charge generation as well as a bunch of lifesteal and attack speed while mapping.
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