Note: I made the classic mistake of mentioning _any_ prices in a poe video. This is arguably THE most SSF friendly build in the game. You can craft a similar axe for only a couple divines or just Rog (and it doesn't matter much since most damage comes from trauma stacks), anything else is incidental. My mistake for saying any price in the video in the first place, it wasn't the point of the video at all and I'm just going to be more careful about editing anything like that out in the future.

Playing boneshatter is one of the best feeling builds for me. Jumping into a pack and hearing the POP sound is orgasmic to me. Also it just feels so good to hit mobs with big axe. feels interactive

"you scale buttons as a melee", damn as a melee main i really felt that one. also btw for the totem setup, only one of your totems need to be linked to multi totems, that can be important when you use vaal ancestral warchief so you don't use both charges at once.

This was by far my favorite build ever. I've only failed to do uber maven but still enjoyed it a lot. One of the reasons I liked it a lot was it didn't use a thousand cluster jewels and uniques. You can pretty much craft everything yourself.

Boneshatter is only popular because it's essentially the only melee skill that is not 4-10x weaker than other non-melee skills.

Loving the idea of seeing you try different archetypes that you can exlpore and share with us. I think your style of content makes it very interesting! :)

There is an upside to pathing to Panopticon... the Mastery. There's a Mastery which causes buffs from Ancestor Totems to linger for some time, which lets you keep them up much easier during bosses (like you would've had them during most of that Uber Shaper clip)

These deep dive videos on mechanics are amazing sub - keep up the good work. Can't wait for 3.22!

Boneshatter is the only truly competetive melee skill, people love melee and want more of it

0:59 Bonezone and Gaping Holes, name a more iconic duo.

Great video, you've been popping up in my feed quite a bit for 3.20 and 3.21, finally hit that sub button because I really enjoy that you went "outside your wheelhouse" and still dropped an absolute banger this late in the league. I haven't touched Boneshatter at all, as I try to avoid the meta as much as I can, but I may just have to give it a try in case they hit it with the nerf bat next league.

Celestial boneshatter also looks so nice when you pop a screenwide pulse. Sometimes a nice aesthetic can really augment the enjoyment of playing a skill. I don't really like Boneshatter in trade league, there are better feeling starters. But it's a powerhouse in SSF. It gets you to max atlas completion so fast. I think Aspect of Carnage Forbidden Jewels are a really nice fit for Boneshatter. You're tanky enough to absord the 10% increased damage taken and the 40% more damage makes a huge difference for single target. Also, you can use Inexorable on the tree for Endurance charges, it keeps you at max charges permanently.

Just as a recommendation, Divergent Boneshatter gains 1% attack speed per trauma stack (at 20% quality) as well as the extra phys damage from trauma having "breakpoints." At level 8 you gain 3% more damage per trauma, but it doesn't hit 4% until 20. The physical damage taken per trauma at 8 is only 31, while 20 is 194 per stack. Ideally, you could stack more trauma with higher attack speed, scaling the "more damage" higher, though the flat physical you gain from the skill would cap at 31-58, as opposed to 158 to 238. Also, I remember I think a few leagues ago where people were running self-curse with Anomalous Boneshatter on Berserkers and bringing servers to their knees with how much they could stack attack speed. Now, of course, they've eliminated the infinite attack speed interaction, but you can still easily hit 10+ attacks per second with a 2 handed mace. Combined with Trypanon (replica too) and crit multi stacking, along with rage, blitz charges and some flat damage items/jewels, you could make a monster that just wiggles a little to kill things.

I would like to mention that Havoc made a Jug boneshatter 0-50 build guide for the last gauntlet (3.20).

I so miss the self curse/mantra of flames version of this. The amount of damage you could get in a big tanky pack was amazing.

Holy crap. I went for a Boneshatter Slayer back when Curcible started but then became inactive. I just got back into the game and your character seems so insanely more powerful, even though I invested more than 6 Div

Also, a large thread of hope can give you Panopticon and some other really damn good nodes for boneshatter. Panopticon, hatchet master, art of the gladiator, mana flows, spirit void, master of the arena, rampart and iron reflexes. Also, CWDT can sustain blood rage in most cases.

"Most people are just sick of dying". Pretty much sums it up.

I would recommend grabbing panopticon on the tree so you can grab ancestral buff linger, it feels so nice

It's great ls cuz fast gearing, ez upgrades. The way to get dmg is to go divergent bonezone and ashes with high pdr. Suppress cap very hard to get( recommend crafting on hybrid armour/eva max roll suppress bases). End of week 1 was doing all content, all ubers etc

welcome to the Bone Zone ™

Righteous fire is magicc thicc boi Boneshatter is physiccal thicc boi I think that's it

you can use skills in the "hidden" slots by seting the keybinds directly, especially useful for cecromancers who in genreral have even more buttons than fingers

You're pathing right past the fortify cluster. Fit "melee hits fortify" from the fortify mastery into your passive tree. Replace fortify support with rage support or another support gem that grants 30%+ more damage. It's more reliable against bosses and stun immune enemies. Plus, it simply deals more damage this way since fortify support only offers 19% more damage vs other %more support gems that offer more.

Love everything in the vid. very accurate. Hm..panopticon is amazing. But more importantly you also take the keep totem buffs for 3s after you leave area. You kinda sorta have those buffs near permanently during boss fights. It's beyond nice. You have to think/accept of it as part of the main build. walk to boss, drop totems on its face, leap in and slap. It's part of the build.

This is why I love your videos/twitch. You are willing to try out other builds and admit that you don’t know everything about it. But like your last league start you try out new builds and keep playing with it till it works 👍🏼

in the video you mention need 3 gem for 2 totem. but if you use vaal version you dont need to use multiple totem. so 1vaal ancestral warchief and 1 normal ancestral protector. it works good when mapping maybe not so much for ubers

As a softcore player, I tried it in SSF last league somewhere mid-league, it is very comfy indeed, but as you mention in the video, single target is lacking. Not even perfect axe will save you, it's just the nature of the skill, you scale it off attack speed and recoup mechanics to sustain trauma stacks. If you attack too fast, you deal to much damage to yourself, so your DPS uptime is gonna drop, because you have to back off to not die lol. Other than that, kinda decent for finishing the Atlas, minus the boss encounters - they are doable, but require some micro management and "know how" on bosses (mechanics, boss ability cooldowns, etc.). I've tried Slayer version though, which is slightly better in mapping, but comes with the downside of having to keep attacking things to leech, you can't just stand afk in the middle of the pack - you will die.

I miss lightning strike being a meta build. Probably the most fun league for me. I like fairly low maintenance to play, but extremely mechanically deep builds. Min/Maxxing Lightning Strike was super fun, and I even used Body Swap support for the meme of making Lightning Strike be Flicker Strike (which actually worked really well).

Boneshatter is easily my favorite league starter. Personally I prefer slayer, but when I tried jugg it was good too. One thing I did want to point out is I think your axe is more than 5 divs on its own, probably more than 10 divs for the base and to craft, but you can do t16 maps with like a 500pdps axe too. fractured bases are just really hard to come by early league, I was looking every day for fractured bases this league start on despot or ezomyte axes and there were just almost none available that had fractured t2 or t1 hybrid phys or %inc phys. Like you said you can rog craft something like this, but there is a good chance you won't get an axe this good quickly. Just wanted to let people know because I was surprised at how hard it was to find a good axe base to craft on this league start

You hit the nail on the head for the problems with melee builds: totems and panopticon. Its pretty much required on every melee build and feels so bad to play.

It's popular because people actually do want to play melee (GGG in shock), so when it's somewhat viable with only one build people flock to it

Something you can add at least early game with no currency that not only adds a ton of damage and utility but also a ton of defenses is utilizing that second 6 link or even just a 4L setup with a Bladestorm Support setup with your Rage+LGOH+PCOC (If trying to scale crit) +Culling+Leech or just about anything else you can think of that adds to the build and you just drop a couple bladestorms on the ground in blood or sand stance (Blood gives us free more attack speed and Sand is very handy for defenses via Blind) and proc tons of extra damage and utility. I've did this on ALOT of melee builds where this is possible and it really does add a lot to the build for nothing currency wise. Hell over half of my most successful melee builds that took to endgame even ubers on a melee starter utilitzed this. This is especially good with Zerker but, Jugg as well as any melee build using a Sword or Axe makes good use of this.

Why is Boneshatter popular? Simple : because people make starter guides for it. So few melee builds get guides and so many players like the archetype.

Yeah i did carns slayer version. Was super good, for being melee. Was never close of killing myself. Didnt regret, and quite enjoyed it. Didnt even min max a lot. And got the job done as a starter build. Boneshatter is gg

I just can't get the boneshatter jugg tanky enough to feel good on ssf. just feels bad, sure I am doing something wrong I cant find

My only gripe with this build is running into Exploding Purple Archnemesis while leveling,when u still have no chaos res and getting 1shotted because of poor visibility.

Same thoughts. I am a melee fan, made bone shatter mid league with high Investment but like you said , hits a wall hard . There’s no way to scale It properly and the slow ramp on trauma stacks just takes off so much time for big bosses uptime

Honest opinion, I played boneshatter and then Elemental Dot and now Detonate Dead. Melee damage output is just abysmal. Out of all the playthroughs, boneshatter was the most tedious. Melee damage needs serious buffs.

Thanks - I had heard about this build, but I never looked into it. Looks pretty slick.

Decent clear, kills ALL bosses, roggable gear in all slots, no activating uniques, can do any atlas strategy. Boneshatter is the everman's build, it's a known quantity where you know that it'll never let you down and it's compatible with most of if not all of the chase uniques.

Sadly we are reaching a point where if a build doesnt kill uber bosses in 5 seconds it considered a "bad build"

sub still regularly handing out the much needed poe-fix. thank you sir, much love

back in mah day, budget use to be less than 10 c. Now it costs nearly 900 c (according to 1 180c per divine price) to do a "budget" build...

Problem with meta builds is that, even if we have 100s of possible skill combos, nobody use them anymore and they become forgotten until a streamer revives them. My suggestion: find old meta builds and check if they are still playable: cyclone as melee and not coc generator, volatile dead, etc. I know some builds have been nerfed, but are they still playable? As I never got to do bosses and am stuck at t16, would also appreciate simple 1 or 2 button builds suggestions for next league. I usually play minions or totems because i have aiming difficulties and cant zoomzoom maps. Tried RF this league but started getti g bit boring after a while. Thank you for content and feedback. Have a great day. PS: if anyone has simple build build suggestions, or easy to follow content creators I would be grateful. Love seeing build ideas but regret that following them is not possible due to button smash or exceeding my few divines budget (more than 10 divines is usually already too much...). Thank you.

I’ve been trying to find something like this for the archetype of wanders. I haven’t seen too many people talking about them besides corrupting fever and cast on crit. So it would be cool to see your take on it.

I am now even more melee curious :D I can very much see the appeal of this starter even in SC trade.

you missed the one mastery where monsters killed by your hits are destroyed - it adds a similar pop to the enemies like herald of ice just without the mass aoe its not much, its not needed but it adds just satisfaction you did not expect

KZfaq content has been great lately despite the POE drought!

I think it's so popular because it's one of the only non projectile melee builds that's viable to play without insane investment

You should def try the Slayer version also. The bonking is even crazier!

Love these types of in-depth videos!

Should be noted there are also other versions of this build. You can go Brass Dome for a relatively cheap GIGA tank, thats what I did and got about 16mil dps on a 5 div axe. If you want to scale beyond god himself I've seen people build Stasis Prison and get 400 trauma stacks and push near a billion DPS so it can scale if you really want it to. Additionaly you don't really need multi totem support; Vaal ancestral warcheif has +1 totems on it so when your fighting a boss you spawn the vaal version and the protector. Abusing crucible i was later able to craft a 1800 DPS axe that had a free fortify support that bumped my damage over 40mil but that's not always gonna be achievable on my style of build depending on the league, but i was able to fight uber bosses on about half a second of ping. IMO the build is perfect, cheap enough to league start and cruise to red teir maps and stong enough to let a bad player like me face the hardest challenges the game has to offer with some investment. Oh and the only time dots were a problem for me was when i was messing around in pvp and a rightous fire build said no to all the fire res i had stacked

Never thought of categorizing PoE gems in terms of kink perspective

Divergent Boneshatter can have excellent single target at high investment. I have around 300k hit pool which makes me able to get to around 300 trauma stacks without dying. At 300 stacks I have about 100m dps, and I still have a lot of ideas for making me able to reach 400-500 stacks.

Thanks for the breakdown, I was always curious about it

Can’t wait for some POE action! Kinda getting over D4 already. It was nice for a quick bit but I want some new love with POE2 coming.

"Can I tank this?" Is the epitome of juggernaut appeal. I am always looking for the most ridiculous damage to try and ignore. Sadly, as you say there are usually ones you cannot ignore as jugg, and they are usually the "you have no/ignores physical damage reduction" and no regen/recovery. Every time I wandered through a map only to be randomly oneshot by some turd with overwhelms phys while im at 90 phys I think "why did I even bother investing in this?". I think that "phys taken as" is the play until that level of total defense invalidation goes away and that makes most of the jugg ascendancy irrelevant.

like any armour stacking build, it's susceptible to "ignores phys dam reduction" mods on rares, or expedition markers. It's pretty much instant death.

This was my first melee league, I played groundslam instead of boneshatter and absolutely loved it!

It's precisely for the reason you mentioned regarding Boneshatter's lack of scalability that the Slayer version is superior Imho. Not because Slayer Boneshatter is better than Juggernaut, it's not. It's because Slayer can transition into a different build like say Starforge/Voidforge Cyclone once you've farmed a bunch of currency, and for those other heavy duty melee builds Slayer is indeed vastly superior to Juggernaut. With that said Boneshatter itself is perhaps the best way to fully utilize the Juggernaut ascendancy by turning its vast defenses into offense and making for both a very tanky(for most content in the game) and very high damage too, which is a pretty rare combination. Righteous Fire for example is well known as the most tanky build in the game but it also has very low damage for the investment. Other builds typically make a choice between damage and tankiness, sacrificing one for the other. Since Boneshatter uses its defenses for damage(hitting yourself for trauma stacks) you don't choose between defense and offense but rather build defense in order to maximize your offense. Still, it will never reach the damage numbers of those builds that do sacrifice defense for offense but I daresay with smart investment it can get tankier than even righteous fire as you can stack quite a lot of max elemental resistances(from skill tree including some masteries as well as items like The Brass Dome) to give you insane physical and elemental damage mitigation. You also have enough room to put chaos resistance in there for good(but not great) chaos mitigation to boot.

It's easy it was meta because cArn, and Imexile and every other racer played Boneshatter in the 3.20 gauntlet up to lvl 98 or what ever. This is easily the #1 reason. Then every streamer said Boneshatter was good including Ben. They said it was the only good melee build. It's also the only melee build you can do endgame with a 4 socket weapon and 4 socket chest. There is your answer.

WOW ! Ty for the vid. Its my first league i got a Mage blood and i allways wanted to deep delve.... Here i am , currently at 800 depth i really need someone to explain deep delve and some build questions. Its hard to buy anything this late in league...If anyone with a boneshatter delve char is reading this... pls sell me your stuff and teach me deep delve secrets. :D

I was melee curious in college, but I really don't talk about that now.

looking at the chieftain rework, it seems like it might be a decent way to do it, you lose some armor and as, but you can run 90% all res and 40 or 60% phys damage taken as fire, which offsets not having armor for ele damage by quite a lot and it works for dots, we also get less pressure on suffixes which gives the opportunity to get a decent amount of chaos res, and it can free up the amulet as we don't need to scale accuracy that much, so we can go for a 3/0/0 leadership's price and maybe crit, or just an amulet with decent stats. edit: with some very rough calculations using an approximation of chieftain rework with dawnbreaker/cloak of flames with a reasonable 1h, you lose around half the damage for double the tankiness. though the early gearing is probably easier as a chieftain.

TIL I like boneshatter because I just want someone to love and take care of me. Dommy mommy tornadoshot sounds kinda fun though.

i dont know, things like uber shaper and uber uber elder were never a problem for me when i played back in sanctum (mageblood). I was doing a tempered by war set up (90% max fire res) so the only thing that was dangerous for me was Uber maven with the regen removal.

It would be fun to explore the builds that the least amount of people are playing. There's so much bloat on YT for the popular builds, like Boneshatter, Hexblast Mines, Explosive Arrow, etc. But there aren't enough people exploring the really niche builds that might end up being very fun.

well it has 200 base physical damage (most skills dont have any. elemental skills have around 100. cyclone has 35) and has the stack mechanic for more damage which is easily 40-80% more damage. the way small hits work you dont even need much armour to 90% reduce the self damage you take. with determination and armour gear you take 200 self damage on hit but it turns out you can easily abuse this self inflicted damage for your own benefit to perma trigger "when hit recently" effects. or use cast when damage taken. imagine they buff cyclone from 28-42 physical damage to 150-250 and give "deals 15% more damage per second you channel up to 75% more damage" then cyclone would only be as strong as boneshatter is right now, probably still way less because people use boneshatter in endgame builds to scale the trauma stacks way higher and also cyclone has 300% attack speed and 59% attack damage so 177% effective damage and boneshatter has 85% attack speed and 250% attack damage so 212,5% effective damage (20% more)

Please make more of these! They are very fun to watch! ^^

They should impliment a support gem, "cast TotemSkill while a rare or unique enemy is nerby" or if you "hit a rare or uniqe enemy with a melee weapon" or something.

dude the biggest thing i learned from this was cast on death portal thats genius

I have a cyclone Slayer that I'm working on and I took the no-life regen for more leech notable so something like that would be perfect for me

After watching that Uber Elder encounter i understand why there is a Reason cArn goes Slayer instead, the 20% cull its a must if youre playing Boneshatter and rushing to do Ubers.

Gonna try this build.noob here :) thanks much for all the guides.keep them coming

Boneshatter is the #1 deep delve build this league too. With the correct (non-traditional) setup, it can scale almost infinite damage and infinite regen with good gear.

I don't think it's the defenses. For me, it and RF are just the best starter because it's essentially able to safely speed clear T16s with garbage you found while leveling. Literally zero investment. A lot of that comes from spending a huge amount of points in defense, and so all of your investment after that is going to be getting damage, but neither of them are really bossers. I don't think most people stick around in a league long enough to make a bosser, and most of the good bossers are terrible without 20+ divines and most of them are not SSF viable. The average person wants to just play the game, by themselves, maybe with a couple of friends, have fun, and then move on. If trade is involved, even if it's just a couple of divines, the build is trash.

I wanna know how that shaper arena disaster came to be xd

ty for showing why i still never played melee builds in POE :) maybe in poe 2 i gonna try some melee if they rework the whole playstyle and defences :)

My only peoblem with bonezone was the Boss DMG so far...

I tried the build and its main benefit wsa that it really is pretty fun to play. UNfortunately it was not for me since it just has so many map mods that I cant really handle without god tier gear compared to ranged builds that can work around even pretty bad mods. I am someone that normally doesnt really look at my map mods and just die or kite around when the occaional bad mod pops up but with boneshatter you cant really do that since there are to many that destroy the build.

so many people WANT to play melee, but (i forget when exactly) we recently got a reply ' only a small percentage of players play melee so we dont focus on it' im paraphrasing, but it means that theyre not realising the underlying issue, thinking that melee isnt popular. sadly the functionality of poe is meta builds and guides, new players/casual players will go for the more popular more advertised builds, and avoid melee due to the meme of melee is dead.

Love this video, thank you for putting it together :D

Bone shatter is the best melee skill because it have the best dps, good attack speed, good damage scaling with supoort gems, can stun, lowest mana cost on all melee red gem and build in splash. It just simply the best melee skill option, no other red, green gem can compete with boneshatter. Jugg is just an add-on for the skill that why some people play slayer. (Berserker simply dont have the survivability for the self damage aspect of boneshatter and champion is just the worst verion of jugg for boneshatter)

im thinking between this and srs something for 3.22

I tried a Bonezone Slayer last league and it felt really squishy. Maybe I'll have to give the Jugg version a try.

I just started playing POE, can you make a video on Flicker Strike? I'm running that right now

Another factor it is good is that you don't need other support like Melee Splash or Ancestral Call. It truly is a stupid skill. Imagine every melee single target skill has this built-in features, every melee skill would feel so much better.

It feels amazing to Play but overall boeshatter Has low damage uptime since u have to dodge Boss stuff

Cuz ppl love melee and it’s one of the only good melee skills lol Edit: the state of melee in poe is pretty bad though. Every build uses the same totems, rage, and berserk

I know the new chieftain tree looks bad but what about bone shatter chieftan. You can do full conversion to ele and easily get 85% res to whatever ele you wanna convert too. That basically negates the self damage completely on top of the whole free lvl 30 ancestral call. Regen would have to be solved via the tree though, just a random thought. Jugg is still super strong though.

Is there anything you could use on weapon swap for boss damage?

because the idea of smacking something so hard it kills everyone around it is hilarious

How do you play that slow guy? He was so difficult to play in acts. Not saying about single-targets, acts bosses. So a slayer was like a fresh breathe for me.

To your point of players liking tankey, yep. My favorite character, my highest level, and my most endgame are all the same; bleed sst gladiator from like 3-4 leagues back. Only had maybe 3m dps, but 8k actual HP and a TON of defences made it seem literally unkillable. Then they gutted sst and tempest shield 😅

I refuse to play melee since 40% of melee dps became having the totems on. Fun fact, during 3.20 announcement stream Q&A Chris said they want to untie totems and melee, despite 3.20 introducing a mastery making totem buffs linger for 3 seconds but 3.21 went with total radio silence regarding this topic.

Would you say this is more fun/better than righteous fire jugg as a league starter? In your opinion.

maybe im biased since i started my build differently but with Glacial Hammer i got better results on my build. Boneshatter always ended up killing me while with GH i basically used life potion only on big boss fights

Because it's easy and cheap and simple to deal good single and aoe, good defense, good offense, versatile, on hit mechanics for free. Just an awesome skill at any budget

boneshatter felt good but it didn't have the dps for bosses and i would always have to back away because of trauma. my gear wasn't min maxed but i did put some hours on it. i guess the lvl 100 chars had some secret