Identity
Warbringer is Warrior's totem-and-warcry Ascendancy: you break enemy Armour with your hits, redirect a chunk of incoming damage into summoned Totems and a Jade damage-absorption buffer, and remove Warcry cooldowns entirely for near-permanent buff uptime. It's less about personal burst damage and more about making the whole fight easier to survive — for you and for anything standing near your Totems.
Notables
- Anvil's Weight — Break Armour equal to 10% of Hit Damage dealt.
- Imploding Impacts — You can break enemy Armour to below 0; Fully Broken Armour you inflict increases all damage that enemy takes from Hits instead of just reducing their mitigation. This turns Armour-breaking from a defense-shred into a genuine damage multiplier once you push past zero.
- Jade Heritage — Grants the skill Encase in Jade; gain a stack of Jade every second. (One community source describes this node as affecting Curse Duration instead — that's a confirmed error on that source's part, not a real alternate version; every other source, including an official PoE forum thread, only ever describes the Jade/damage-absorption mechanic.) The exact damage-reduction-per-stack and stack cap are still only single-sourced — treat any specific numbers you see quoted for this node as approximate until a second source confirms them.
- Answered Call — Grants the skill Ancestral Spirits; triggers it when you summon a Totem; +1 to your maximum number of summoned Totems.
- Wooden Wall — 20% of damage from Hits is taken from your nearest Totem's Life before it's taken from yours.
- Renly's Training — Gain 35% base chance to Block from your equipped Shield, instead of the Shield's own listed value. (Some older guides still show a pre-patch 40% — 35% is the current, verified figure.)
- Turtle Charm — You take 30% of damage from Blocked Hits, and your maximum Block chance is raised to 75%. (This node was reworked in patch 0.2.0 — its pre-0.2.0 version worked completely differently, around a flat Block Chance reduction rather than a damage-taken-on-Block clause. A couple of older guides still describe that old version; 30%/75% is current.)
- Warcaller's Bellow — Corpses in your Presence explode, dealing 25% of their Life as Physical Damage, and your Warcries ignore their Cooldowns entirely. (The Warcry-cooldown-ignore effect used to live on a separate node called Greatwolf's Howl, which was merged into this node in patch 0.3.0 — Greatwolf's Howl no longer exists as its own notable.)
Small passives
- 20% increased Armour
- 25% increased Armour Break
- 6% increased Block chance
- 20% increased Totem Life
- 20% increased Warcry Speed
Keystone
Warbringer has no keystone-tier node of its own — its kit is built entirely from the notables and small passives above.
Practical notes
- Anvil's Weight and Imploding Impacts are a package deal: breaking Armour is only a damage multiplier once you're actually pushing enemies past 0 Armour, which takes sustained hits, not a single burst.
- Wooden Wall and Answered Call work best together — more Totems (from Answered Call) means more Life pooled for Wooden Wall to redirect damage into before it reaches you.
- Turtle Charm's 75% Block cap and Renly's Training's 35% base Block are your defensive floor — this Ascendancy leans on Block far more than Titan or Smith of Kitava do, so a Shield is close to mandatory rather than optional.
