Hello everyone. I'd like to present another set of Kinetic Blast of Clustering builds to you all.

All of the pobs I'm going to present are iterations on Palsteron's fantastic build guide. This guide is what inspired me to try the build, and I fell in love with it, to the point where I worked on multiple iterations of it with a friend from Palsteron's discord.

If you are unfamiliar with Kinetic Blast of Clustering, I highly recommend watching Palsteron's video. He goes over how it works in great detail. I will summarize some of the key points in the relevant sections of this guide.

I'm also showing 4 pobs at different budgets. The main one I will focus on is the 700 div Headhunter version of the build. This is the one I think will be accessible to most people. The 500 div budget option is there in the same pob as the 700 div build to provide a slightly cheaper starting step. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a nice way to scale stuff at lower cost, at least not to the point where Hiero feels better than Deadeye.

There are also two more pobs, at 4 and 11 mirror budgets. These are there for people with more currency, or those who simply want to start with cheaper builds but still have a goal. The 11 mirror version is the pob I am currently playing. I will not be discussing these in detail, but feel free to ask questions if you're interested.

Comparison of 700 div budget PoB with Palsteron's build:

Pros:

• Slightly tankier in bossing situations: This pob has slightly higher phys max hit, mostly due to having more unreserved mana and leveraging enfeeble against tough single enemies. We are also crit immune due to Enfeeble balance of terror tech.
• Much higher single target dps: We use Unwavering Crusade forbidden jewels to gain a lot of phys as extra cold. This also enables using some useful Watcher's eye mods like Hatred Base crit without the mana reservation.
• Slightly Cheaper: Be warned though, that the cheapness may be artificial, because the Watcher's eye, Impossible Escape and Forbidden Jewels could easily spike in price if supply is choked.
• Easier to scale into multimirror territory: If you want to multimirror with this build, CI int + mana stacking with Sublime Vision Purity of Fire is the best way, and Unwavering Crusade has incredible synergy with Sublime Vision, as it allows you benefit from the really powerful watcher's eye mods such as Hatred base crit, anger crit multi/phys as fire, wrath phys as lightning/crit. There are also good int stacking trickster variants, but I prefer the Int + Mana scaling because Indigon is just so much damage.

Cons:

• Slightly Worse Clear: Palsteron's build gets a lot of physical explode that scales off the phys as extra elemental in his build. This means our clear is definitely worse than Palsterons, so this is a tradeoff. But in my opinion, the build has sufficient clear since it blows up 2 screens with one attack, and losing some to fix other issues feels good.
• DPS is less consistent, especially in maps with extra elemental resistance: Palsteron's version uses Inevitable Judgement to ignore res on crit, and crits 80% of the time. We use the ele inversion mastery instead, to be able to leverage Unwavering Crusade, but still mitigate ele res modifiers.
• Extra button required every 10 seconds for balance of terror.
• Guardian's blessing via Marionette spectres. Won't have perfect uptime, but haste is just a nice extra, it's not mandatory for the build to feel good.
• No hand-me-downs in trade. You have to craft the gear. I've provided detailed crafting guides for all rare items in the notes section of the 700 div PoB. For higher mirror tier pobs, you can ask me for some help, I will try to reply here.

PoBs

1. 700 div budget, with 500 div alt: https://pobb.in/DEK-PcrPUN8V, read the notes section for a full crafting guide. At this budget, I would not recommend Mageblood. HH provides a lot of very strong things at this budget, and while Mageblood is faster movespeed, you don't have the currency to leverage everything else it offers (like solving ele res). If you do have a 1.5-2 mirror budget however, you can take this PoB, slap on Mageblood, and replace the boots with elevated tailwind, elevated onslaught boots with t1 suppress (and elusive + life + movespeed), for a ton more speed. Crafting these boots is a lot more feasible than in past leagues, using the beastlock method. I posted a full guide to crafting such boots (with t1 int not suppress but it's the same) in this rather long reddit post

2. 4-5 mirror version: https://pobb.in/ollDK075_UFK. This version is slightly less tanky than the MoM 700 div pob, but has way, way more damage. There's also an original sin version that gets a bit more damage for slightly less tank (no enfeeble), but I'm not posting that as it isn't 1 mirror better than this version.

3. 11 mirror version: https://pobb.in/IrhQQvF-mtHf. This is my current pob. Most of the gear is replicable in that you can mirror the items. Full disclosure, I crafted the mirror wands. They cost me 5.5 mirrors to make, they are on Sushi's shop for a relatively low fee. Also, this build is near perfect, there are only 3 big upgrades. One is a set of perfect small clusters that I hope to craft this weekend, with which you swap to a 4 1 passive voices setup and gain 3k ES and 10m damage. The other two are reflections of rings and amulets with all positive mods. That will require a crazy amount of mirrors at current lock prices.

Mechanics/Scaling: Now we get into some interesting theory about the build.

Brief summary of mechanics:

KB of clustering when it hits an obstacle or an enemy, or the ground when it ends its flight, creates a cluster of explosion in a circular pattern around where it stops. Instead of getting extra projectiles, it gets extra explosions. Normally, this is very clunky. But when you cast it with spellslung Tornado and returning projectiles, it will always fork off the tornado first, explode at the end, then return, and explode again, creating a massive aoe of explosions that actually overlap nicely on single target as well.

From some testing, you seem to get 3-4 overlaps against most enemies in the open, and more if the area is enclosed and the boss is near walls.

Offense:

• We scale the offense via mana stacking. Mana provides flat damage through the KB of clustering gem. It also provides a metric ton of increased damage through Indigon since spell damage is converted to twice as much attack damage. While Indigon may seem clunky if you've used it before with spells, the fact we can instant leech mana solves most problems we here. We augment the leech with the mana mastery that provides 10% chance to recover mana on skill use, and also get the same mod on a clarity watcher's eye. This does mean that Cannot Leech maps are not really runnable.

• Unreserved Mana also provides a ton of AoE via Sanctuary of thought. This is what makes the clear so great.

• Since most of the damage is physical, we convert to elemental to scale. We actually convert 75% of the damage to cold, and 25% to lightning. This lets us leverage trinity and also provides both shock and freeze to the build. Since all of our damage scaling is generic damage, and our ele pen is mostly generic, this is an upside, not a downside.

• We use Unwavering Crusade forbidden jewels for level 27 Hatred, Wrath and Anger. The Wrath and Anger are a small upside combined, but the Hatred aura provides massive damage. For slightly higher budget, it also enables a ton of base crit from a Watcher's eye mod that you otherwise do not have access to.

• To compensate for not having Inevitable Judgement jewels, we use the mastery to invert ele resistance 25% of the time, and stack more ele pen via Trinity.

• We get rage via gloves. I have conservatively put Rage at 15, but while mapping you will constantly have 30 rage. I also put 20% shock, but you should hit 30% with the crit mastery against pinnacles.

Defense:

• Mana stacking naturally provides a large source of defense via MoM. Mana + Int Stacking allows us to also scale a large amount of Energy shield, since Mana provides flat energy shield, and int scales both mana and ES simultaneously. This is why the multimirror versions go very hard on int stacking.

• We add a number of conditional defense layers. While all of these will not have perfect uptime, the combination of them makes us very tanky, especially in single target situations where they are mostly up. These buffs are: Arcane Cloak (50% uptime), Max stage sigil of power (100% uptime against bosses with good positioning, max stage is reached instantly), Enfeeble (100% uptime against anything you care to curse unless they are doing damage while invulnerable)

• We freeze the screen. The minimum freeze threshold on this build is 48 million HP, you'll freeze everything short of titanic rogues/t17 bosses. Even ubers are frozen, though remember that Ubers and T17 bosses have minimum 50% action speed.

• Corrupted Soul from the Glorious Vanity allows us to split damage between life and ES, meaning our MoM is actually active even while the Energy shield is present.

• Full ailment immunity from Aul's Uprising. This really reduces pressure elsewhere, as our jewel slots are really strong and we don't want to waste a jewel + affixes solving ailments. There is an alternative, if you can get 100% shock avoid on the abyss jewels, but this is hard to get.

• To solve stun, we use an ES mastery to add ES to our stun threshold. We also add a flask to help avoid stun, but this may be unnecessary, it's just there for comfort. You can get a different suffix if you prefer.

• 100% spell suppression.

• Phys reflect immunity. We aren't quite immune to ele reflect, tornado does some damage, as does auto-attacking if you overspend mana temporarily, so we try to mitigate that with Yugul + Flask. Since flasks don't have 100% uptime, it may be worth not running ele reflect maps, and using a different flask suffix.

• Small note for the multimirror version: We don't go MoM there because we use Purity of Fire Sublime Vision, which prevents Corrupted Soul since you need Rakiata Lethal Pride. There, we actually use Arctic Armour (good uptime against bosses/rogues) and just stack tons of ES via int stacking, but do lose Suppress.

Recovery:

We leech tons of life, mana and ES. DO NOT RUN NO LEECH MAPS.

Content these builds run well:

These builds are optimized for fast mapping in dense maps. Even on the 700 div budget, you can comfortable clear T17s with most map mods and run any content except titanic MF farming.

There isn't a lot of room for MF on this build till you get to the higher budgets, and there you either need to mirror an MF ring or find a good reflected ring. I have now attempted Titanic T17 bosses at 80% deli and even with the 11 mirror build, those are tough as hell, though exiles themselves are not a problem. This build has good single target but not the 1billion dps needed to make those maps comfortable.

You can do ubers on all versions of this build. Ubers are honestly mostly a joke here, unless you totally suck at their mechanics.

Conclusion and Shoutouts:

This build has been an absolute blast to play, and my friend and I have put a lot of effort into optimizing these pobs, so I wanted to share these with you all. Hopefully you enjoy the build. I hope to be able to record some videos, in which case I will add them, but I've never done that before so it will have to wait till the weekend. I will also try to answer questions in this thread, so feel free to ask them, though it may take me a day or two to respond.

Also, some shoutouts: First of all, to Palsteron. His video was the big inspiration for these builds, and without it, I wouldn't have found one of my favorite builds ever. Second, this guide is not my creation alone. My friend from Palsteron's discord doesn't have a reddit account or I'd shout him out directly, but he built the core pob for the build. We both iterated on this a ton after that pob, and we both collectively crafted the gear for the multimirror versions, but without his initial insight, this wouldn't exist.