Bad Build Report - Shankgonne

What is Shankgonne and what's the pros/cons of how I (badly) built it

Shankgonne is one of the new uniques added in 0.3 and I am a very stupid person who makes bad builds, typically very stubbornly around a single unique. This is a report of how my build went.

Here are the pros:
- Cool flip animation
- Your cannon leg makes little sparks on the ground
- Guaranteed ignite is good for combos, and guaranteed blind is a nice extra defensive layer
- Fantastic 3D art and vibes
- Can kill regular Arbiter of Ash, as well as 3rd difficulty pinnacles due to burst damage and Tactician ascendancy pin

Here are the cons:
- No Sprint
- Dodge-roll has a CD
- You will have to be in general melee range in order for your peg-leg to explode in the enemies face
- It's probably bad
- Failed to do highest difficulty pinnacles due to CD on dodge roll and no movement speed, you might be do better though as I am bad

Below is the unique, the skill associated with the unique, and the fit (Slayer of Demons about to peg-leg flip their way to King Allant the 12th).





How I built around peg-leg style flipping

Short Version (PoB): https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/d096

Long Version:

As said earlier, I tend to make builds around a single unique and am quite stubborn about it. As such, a Evasion/Armour base type with Grenade synergy made me pick Mercenary.

I decided to play Tactician for two reasons:
1) Never played tactician
2) Tactician has access to more Deflection Rating Equal to #% of Armour, as well as Pin acting as a pseudo-freeze defensive layer (which is huge when you main defensive mechanic is a CD flip).

Due to the guaranteed Ignite and the Unique Skill's ability to detonate grenades, I decided that Gas Grenade was a perfect fit - not only can we detonate the grenade into the gas cloud at an instant, but the guaranteed ignite from the Unique also explodes those gas clouds so long as an enemy ignited by your unique is in the gas cloud's radius.

To synergize with this, oil grenade is also excellent as we can ignite the ground with the peg-leg back-flip - giving us easy access to exposure.

Gas grenades can overlap, with each gas cloud having the capacity to explode on the same target. Gas grenade has a limit of 6 gas clouds - game-play wise we press gas grenade, black powder blitz, and then oil grande into gas grenade spam if the enemy is still alive.

I found this game-play quite enjoyable. Please note that this bad build is struggletown for uber Arbiter of Flame or highest difficulty pinnacles, as dodging core mechanics is kinda hard when half your leg is missing and your cannon foot needs a little nap each time it's used.

Please see the PoB link for specifics with what gear I was running at the time. My gear was not outstanding, however we where capped on the 50% armour and evasion ratings from the Tactician nodes due to specific evasion passives on the skill tree. I believe I spent about 8 divines on the build in total, with 6 of those divines being put into the crossbow. I believe I could do the uber bosses if I started to heavily invest into better items, however another bad build calls to me.

If you don't have PoB (path of building), here is the gear summary:
- Crossbow (Physical damage, attack speed is only relevant equal to your cool-down recovery)
- Armour and evasion base types. Rings and amulets may need extra strength to account for Herald of Ash (clear will feel horrible without this).
- Nova Projectile support will overlap when fired at point blank range. With the crossbow base type that fires an additional projectile, this support will let you hit the x6 gas cloud limit per shot.
- Link the ignite spread support to your unique's skill, as in high tier maps one dodge roll press will give you enough ignites in the pack to spam your gas grenades. This is especially good for abysses, because that thing does just spawn 100 chuds and the occasional giga chud.

Short summary of the passives:
- evasion and armour nodes are great, but if you select the tactician "Stay Light, Use Cover" ascendancy point you will need respec to ensure you are not wasting passives if your defenses are already at 50%.
- Generic grenade damage, area of effect, cool-down reduction (so long as you can sustain this with a good mana flask), two-handed weapon damage and crossbow damage are good (probably better options but I just vibed it out with a bit of Path of Building comparison when something killed me and I wanted to blame something else but me).
- The pin passive cluster is fantastic if you pick the pin ascendancies. The ability to pseudo freeze mobs is a massive defensive layer, especially with how quickly we build up Pin with AoE overlaps.
- The unique boots is a Detonator Tagged skill, and there for the Detonator passives do synergize (one of them lowers the damage of the skill by 80%, but massive increases the area of effect).

In Conclusion should you play this bad build?

If you like doing Uber Arbiter and max difficulty pinnacle bosses, I would not suggest this. If you enjoy sprinting, or any movement speed in your content, I would also not recommend this (though the distance on the unique skill is surprising long distanced)

If you are just looking for something novelty, enjoy a unique that changes your dodge roll into a sick flip and a very enjoyable mapping play-style of explosion pirate flipping into stinky gas grenades, I can recommend the novelty of the unique. There's probably a significantly better version of this for damage, however I found success with this up to the hardest pinnacle content - I made the build knowing this wouldn't be realistic (panic exploding to get slammed by the Xesht giga hand attack is kinda funny though).