SelfChill double CoC LowLife VD Elementalist

pob: https://pobb.in/B7RvewB5Zn2a

t16 abyss map showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0IF0ka_E9E

Core Mechanics

This league, we got Dread Captain's Cutlass, a new unique weapon with the ability to roll Trigger Ghostly Artillery when you Attack. Ghostly Artillery is also an attack, which means this can be used to run two separate cast on crit setups: once on the main skill (i went with spectral throw), and again on the artillery.

The obvious skills are volatile dead (or DD) with desecrate, or bladefall bladeblast. I went with VD as the weapon has some fire damage synergies built in, and this is an elementalist. Blade blast is definitely a contender though, and could be scaled higher and have more recovery.

The other main mechanic is self chill based on Maligaro's Restraint, Coursing Currents, and Winterweave. The full write up is here, but TLDR: you either shock or chill an enemy, which then becomes a shock with coursing currents, the shock is reflected to you via maligaro belt, and becomes a chill again with coursing currents. Elementalist gives high base shock, so some shock effect is enough to get the 40% self chill effect from it as well. Bound by destiny gives unaffected by shock to save our defenses.

Defenses

For defenses, I went with EB/MoM to sustain mana costs and keep an ES base. This works well enough with such high ES recovery. The underlying life base is a lowlife petrified blood setup for overleech. It synergizes well again with high recovery, and lets us go Zealot's Oath for ES comfort while maintaining overleech for life recovery.

Then it's simple armour ES bases with some life and phys taken as on rares, plus some block on the tree and a Rumi's. Flesh and stone on sand stance is comfy with high AoE from elementalist.

Damage

Since our main gem is in a one hander, use the squire for more supports. Roll combustion support on weapon as well as +1 gems. Winterweave reflects 20% more damage from ascendancy, dragonfangs is high damage, crit is easy to scale as the build is already CoC. Elementalist ascendancy offers a lot of easy damage on shock and exposure node: convergence is very comfortable for mapping, though many witch nodes are really strong contenders for FF jewels too. I went shaper of winter because it is cheap and frees up points for convergence.

The main breakpoint for CoC here is ~6 attacks per second for optimal ghostly artillery and CoC cooldowns, with 0% cdr. Translated to 18 volatile orbs per second on the full dps; I have it set to 14 orbs per second with ~5 aps.

Though, with all this, the opportunity cost to fix defenses with this many uniques costs a lot of potential damage, so I only ended up with a little over 6 million dps on this budget.

Why not necro?

Going necromancer would mean dropping the self chill tech and using just corpse pact for attack speed. This could end up being better overall, especially with higher investment. Elementalist, though, is just really comfortable to build with golems, cheap access to shock effect, and exposure.

I think a setup with enmity's would be effective on necro, though i have not pobbed any of that.

Pros, Cons, Should you Play

Pros:
- Balls
- Off screen travelling damage with balls
- High recovery makes it comfortable to scale mapping defenses with some block attached
- Cool new tech!

Cons:
- Overall lower damage and defenses than all other popular builds
- ~0.4 second delay on damage while waiting for the cannons to fire (i usually prefire some before walking on screen into a pack to have them ready)
- GPU melts

Should you play: not really

More Investment

I have kind of hit a wall on investment here, and dont know how to progress the build much further without huge purchases (megablood). So any help or suggestions for further scaling are well appreciated!