I have been enjoying trying out lightpoacher builds this league and thought I would share another one. I made a previous post for a lightpoacher CoC purifying flame build which was a lot of fun and farmed around 80 100% delirious maps. That post is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/comments/12s7jjc/lightpoacher_coc_purifying_flame_sabo_build_fun/

For this build I wanted to try out a projectile attack to make use of vengeant cascade. In order to do this with a one handed weapon the build needs a squire because we need Shroud of the Lightless for our chest and lightpoacher for our helmet. Wanted to call that out up front since you do need to have the investment for the squire to get started.

Also another disclaimer that I am not too experienced with stat stacking wanders so I'm not certain if this build is necessarily better. My hunch is that this build gets better mapping damage for a lower cost but doesn't have as many mirror tier scaling options. Take this guide as a showcase more than a recommendation!

Beyond that this build showcases how strong Lightpoacher can be for the right kind of content and the perma berserk tech described below could help you build your own build.

Now that that is out of the way, lets go through the build.

Why is this so strong?

- Lightpoacher gives 5% of physical damage as each elemental damage type per abyss jewels. At my current 18 abyss jewels this is 270% of phys damage as extra elemental damage.

- Shroud of the lightless gives 4% elemental penetration and 3% maximum life per abyss jewel. At my current 18 abyss jewels this is 72% elemental penetration and 54% increased maximum life

- Squire + a wand with supported gems gives me an 8 link

- We can scale off of any phys or elemental damage to attacks (or wand attacks) as well as any increased physical or elemental damage.

- We get permanent berserk with our ascendency paired with Kaom's spirit

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How do we avoid losing spirit charges every time we attack?

- The core piece of this tech is an archmage support socketed into Lightpoacher. This adds a mana cost to Spirit Burst if we have at least 20 mana unreserved.

- There are 2 main options here after this. We could go CI setting our health to 1 and add lifetap to Lightpoacher as well. I didn't like this option because CI is hard to manage on this build with the uniques we have. The other option is to use agnostic to constantly drain our mana to 0. In order for this to work we'll need to never be on full life. Then we use lifetap on everything we want to use.

- We have 2 ways to avoid being on full life and we actually use both. The first is Petrified Blood and the other is the Dissolution of the Flesh with something to stop regen, in this case Kaom's spirit. Petrified blood paired with Dissolution of the Flesh is incredibly strong defensively as long as we can avoid having to use flasks to heal past low life.

So now as soon as we use any skills our lifetap drains our health a bit which makes agnostic permanently drain our mana to 0. We don't have the mana for Spirit burst so we don't lose spirit charges on skill usage.

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Some other interactions:

- Kaom's spirit with some life regen allows us to have berserk on left click so it is nearly always on

- We need either pierce or snipers mark for vengeant cascade to double our damage. I use both

- Defensively we have around 7k life (can go much higher if you want) with Dissolution of the flesh and petrified blood. If we don't go above low life then this means that we only ever take 60% of damage (as reserved damage from Dissolution) allowing us to use our entire life total with the benefit of petrified blood. How do we deal with the damage over time from Petrified Blood? We take the recoup cluster on the passive tree with the mastery that refills our life every 4 seconds. The negative of this mastery (negating applied life regen) doesn't apply to us because of Kaom's spirit.

- Abyss jewels allow us to get ailment immunity with Stormshroud and stun immunity. Depending on your playstyle you could decide not to get either of these and go for more damage since we off screen things anyways.

- We get power charges from power siphon and the power charge cluster on the tree. We get frenzy charges from the frenzy charge cluster. We get endurance charges from the shield cluster. We have a CWDT immortal call as well.

- The elemental mastery providing 25% chance to invert enemy resistances is incredible if you don't reduce enemy resists and instead penetrate them. Vs an enemy with 50% resistances it has a 25% change to set them to -50% instead. Then we have 72% penetration from Shroud and 16% elemental penetration from trinity setting them to -138% resists.

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Cluster jewels:

We have of lot of great options.

- I take 2 devastators for explosions. These are not too necessary and you could also go with one. I believe the phys explosion damage is scaled by Lightpoacher

- I take 2 Storm's hand which gives us phys as extra lightning and phys converted to lightning. We need to proc trinity so don't take more than 2 of these

- Martial prowess helps us get accuracy and avoid the accuracy clusters on the tree. Also gives damage and attack speed

- Feed the fury is incredible. It gives attack damage leeched as life, 30% increased damage, and 15% increased attack speed.

Crucible trees:

- On wand we want flat phys, crit chance, and lifetap. Lifetap is very important, otherwise you can fill in what you want.

- Squire you just take the trees you can get. There are some reasonably priced 100% chance to avoid shock which is helpful for ailment immunity if you don't want to get it on jewels.

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We have a lot of usable Wand Mods:

- (Must-have) Socketed skills deal 40% more attack damage

- (Great) Faster attacks support

- (Great) Crit Strikes support

- (Great) Increased fire damage support (also adds a 100%+ phys roll)

- (Great) Crit chance

- (Great) Flat phys / Increased Phys

- (Good) Volley support

- (Good) Attack speed

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Abyss jewel mods:

- Attack speed and attack speed if you've crit recently

- Phys damage to attack or wands

- Maximum life

- Chance to avoid stun

- Chance to avoid shock (with stormshroud for ailment immunity)

- All max res

- Accuracy

- Attributes

- Other elemental damage with attacks (or wands)

- Phasing/Blind

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Ways you could change the build:

- If you were more focused on zooming through maps you could use haste, go for a faster attack speed wand, drop max life on the tree, potentially enough for another cluster. I've played around with this and we can add another cluster to go from 30m to 40m dps by cutting our life from 6.8k to 5k. That 5k life still includes damage reduction from petrified blood so it would probably feel fine for most content.

- If you were focused on being as tanky as possible you could grab some more life on the tree. We have a lot near where we path. You could switch the War Banner and Herald of Purity out for Determination or Grace

- When starting you can run purity of elements for resists and ailment immunity. It isn't that important to switch to other auras.

- There are 3 life regen wheels on the tree. You can take one or two of these if you want to extend berserk even further.

What does the build cost?

Some of the current upgrades I've made a pretty unnecessary for the build to work such as the jewelry allowing me to drop an accuracy cluster on the tree.

- (23div) Squire

- (?div) Wand. This is a difficult one. I haven't spent more than 1 div on any wand that I bought from trade for the build. I've bought 6-7 and used various methods to craft them in different ways. There is also a wide variety of wands you could buy with different variations of support gems or even non-shaper high phys wands. In terms of crafting from scratch you best bet is probably a shaper wand with jagged, serrated, faceted fossils which can be pretty expensive. I think I spent 4div on metamods for my current wand and bought the rest of the base for 100c. Ran some crucibles to add lifetap and local crit.

- (20c-?) Lightpoacher. A 2 socket can be 20-30c. I corrupted a ton of them to get +1 power charges for my previous build and brought it over to this one.

- (10c-8div) Shroud of the lightless. Can easily get away with a 2 socket version for 10-20c. 8div or so for a 3 socket version

- (30c-5div) Darkness Enthroned. Can easily buy a 90% version for pretty cheap. I decided to just get a 100% version so that I could use a 50% shock avoid on a single jewel for ailment immunity. You can also do this by getting one with shock avoid on both explicit and implicit, or just get two jewels.

- (5c-1div) Kaom's Spirit. These are very cheap. You can go for +lvl of socketed gems for sniper's mark or +attack crit. We can't really get an extra curse on this build easily and we really want to lower enemy resistances, so we don't need a curse on hit.

- (1div-10divs) Boots. You can invest as much as you want here. It is reasonable to just go with action speed implicits and use boots for life/res. If you are using sniper's mark then pierce is optional, otherwise you must get it somewhere. Personally I used the boots to get onslaught, tailwind, pierce, elusive. They weren't actually too expensive because they didn't have a life roll, I think I must have paid under 8 div.

- (1div-15div) Rings. You have a lot of options here. I would encourage you to get chaos res to try and break even on res at least. With Arakali's pantheon for chaos dot this is pretty comfortable. Flat physical damage, attack speed, resists, life, stats, and accuracy are all options here.

- (1-10div) Amulet. We don't need anything specific, you'll probably solve some of your attributes here. Can go for similar stats to rings listed above. The most important thing is anointing vengeant cascade.

- (1div-4div) Flasks. I'm not running anything expensive in this build right now. We get explosions from clusters so we don't need Oriath's end. Progenesis is great defensively but I haven't been having defensive issues yet. Atziri's promise with good rolls on both phys as extra is cheap and pretty impactful. The extra source of leech isn't bad as well. Bottled faith is in an interesting spot. As a wander we're offscreening things a lot of the time so it is a bit questionable. One thing we do get from it is occasional consecrated ground to add to our rage regen. A well crafted Sulfur flask might be just as good. Other flasks are just defenses with flask charges gained on crit.

- (1div) Dissolution of the Flesh. At max roll these are a divine. There is potential for a corrupted implicit here if you want to pay more.

- (3div) Stormshroud. This gives ailment immunity. This is optional for 2 reasons. The first is that you may not even care about ailments for some content if you are offscreening everything. The second is that you can easily run Purity of Elements for this build to help with resists and get ailment immunity. You just drop Herald of Purity, the Banner, and a couple levels off of your precision. I do like to have ailment immunity for Delirium though.

- (20c-2div each) Abyss Jewels. The majority of these I paid under 100c for. A couple of them I paid a dive for. There are many good options and as long as you don't try to stack 4-6 generically good stats on a single jewel you'll be fine.

- (3-6div) Devastator cluster jewels (explosions). They aren't necessary but the explosions are nice. Keep in mind that the notable displayed in the middle on the trade site will be at the back. You may still want to get it in some cases because there are a lot of good wand notables for us. You can also make do with more than 8 passives which drives the price down

- (100c-3div) Other large clusters. Depending on what you want here these aren't too expensive. We have a number of good options for the build. Most notably we life Feed the Fury, Opportunistic fusilade, martial prowess, and no more than 2 Storm's hands. Be careful not to get mana leech.

I think that should be all of the costs, if I think of more I'll add to the list. To summarize I think to get started you'd need about 27-28 divs plus the price of the wand which is quite variable. The current version I have probably has about 60-70 divines in it.

Showcases:

- Just after switching to the build and getting to lvl 90~ I recorded this to explain the interactions and show a T16 map. This showcase has about 1/6th of my current damage but is still fine for t16s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKPJ3NjgL0Y

- Here is an update doing a legion 5 way to level 99. Shows some of the changed gear. I was pretty tired when I recorded this so it may not be that informative: https://youtu.be/2n6u7wBvTjg

- Here is my current PoB. I set rage to 40 since we aren't usually at the 60 max. I have power siphon set to 2 for vengeant cascade because from what I can tell as long as you have pierce it seems to hit twice. https://pobb.in/ScaVvtebIwtc

- Character on poe ninja: https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/ThyEmptyLord/SiphonPoacher

**EDIT:**I added a section on budget above explaining some cheaper alternatives for gear.