This Ancestral Warrior Totem Sunder Warrior Build is a fantastic option for a powerful warrior setup in Path of Exile 2. It's a well-thought-out mix of massive damage, survivability, and versatility, leveraging the weapon swap mechanic and totem synergies to great effect. Here's a breakdown of key aspects of the build:

Key Mechanics:

Totem Setup:

Ancestral Warrior Totem: You drop totems that repeatedly slam the ground, dealing huge amounts of damage with Sunder. These totems work as your primary source of damage.

Sunder: Creates a rolling fissure, providing excellent area coverage. The combination of Upheaval and Magnified Effect allows you to maximize AoE damage while keeping the totems massive.

Weapon Swap:

Weapon Swap Strategy: The build cleverly makes use of weapon sets by allowing you to switch between two sets of weapons. Your Weapon Set 1 is for your high-damage, two-handed weapons used to summon totems. Weapon Set 2 is for one-handed weapons and a shield, providing more mobility and survivability.

Gearing & Skills:

Giant's Blood Keystone: This boosts melee skills significantly, allowing you to hit hard with both your totems and your Sunder gem, stacking physical damage with +skills gear.

Totem Snapshotting: By using weapon swap, you can drop your totems, swap to the second set of weapons, and gain increased mobility and defense while maintaining your totem's high damage.

Defensive Layers:

Energy Shield (ES): Instead of focusing on armor, the build leans on an energy shield as the primary defensive layer, leveraging Grim Feast for increased energy shield regeneration. You can stack your energy shield up to over 4,000 ES.

Time of Need: This provides additional healing and removes curses or ailments, helping mitigate dangerous debuffs in high-level content.

Defensive Auras: You also use Shield Charge (with stun threshold) and Blink for mobility and quick positioning.

Key Skill Gems for Totem (Clear) Setup:

Sunder: Main damage skill, with modifiers that enhance damage, area of effect, and speed.

Martial Tempo: Boosts attack speed, making your Sunder totems faster and more efficient.

Upheaval: Adds additional fissures but lowers attack speed and damage, which is counterbalanced by the massive damage scaling.

Inspiration: Helps reduce the mana cost of Sunder, which is essential for keeping up totem uptime.

Magnified Effect: Increases the AoE of Sunder significantly.

Key Skill Gems for Bossing Setup:

Sunder: Same as in the clear setup, but optimized for pure damage.

Concentrated Effect: Increases damage but reduces AoE, making Sunder very effective against bosses.

Brutality: Increases physical damage significantly, ensuring you hit extremely hard.

Heavy Swing: Adds even more melee physical damage at the cost of attack speed.

Bloodlust: Increases melee physical damage against bleeding enemies (which you apply via Lacerate).

Key Support Gems for Bossing:

Armour Breaker: Adds Daze (through Break Posture) and Lacerate for bleeding. Armor break guarantees critical hits on bosses, which is crucial for making your Sunder skills work even better.

Orb of Storms: Helps trigger additional buffs (like increased rage, life, and mana regen), adding quality-of-life elements to your boss fights.

Weapon Swap Synergy:

Weapon Set 1: For high damage, two-handed weapons (totem summoning and Sunder damage).

Weapon Set 2: For a one-handed weapon and shield for survivability, mobility (via Shield Charge), and utility (via Blink).

Leveling Strategy:

Pillar of the Caged God: While not part of the main build, leveling with Pillar of the Caged God is an optimal strategy for getting to the endgame quickly. It's currently the most efficient way to reach the map phase before you transition into the full Ancestral Warrior Totem build.

Pros of the Build:

Huge damage output: With the combination of Sunder, Ancestral Totems, and armor-breaking mechanics, this build can deal massive damage to both bosses and trash mobs.

Great defense: Using an energy shield as the primary defense, coupled with Grim Feast and Time of Need, makes this build fairly tanky.

Weapon Swap versatility: The clever use of weapon sets allows you to balance offense and defense effectively, making you highly adaptable in different situations.

Immense AoE coverage: The totems and Sunder skill provide large AoE, clearing swathes of enemies with ease.

Bossing potential: The build is optimized to handle some of the toughest bosses in the game with incredible efficiency.

Cons of the Build:

Not beginner-friendly: With its reliance on multiple unique Path of Exile 2 items and Path of Exile 2 currency investment, this build may not be accessible to newer players.

Expensive to scale: To truly make the building shine, you'll need specific gear and gems, which might be out of reach without significant investment or farming.

Complex setup: Managing weapon swaps and totem placement, as well as keeping up with all the buffs, can be a bit complex, particularly when learning the intricacies of the build.

Final Thoughts:

This Ancestral Warrior Totem Sunder Warrior Build offers a unique and powerful approach to playing a warrior in Path of Exile 2. While it may not be the easiest build to get going, its ability to scale into the late game with excellent damage, high survivability, and a flexible playstyle makes it one of the top warrior builds in the game. The use of weapon swapping and totems ensures that you can deal with a variety of content, from clearing maps to taking down powerful bosses.