Mediocre Showcase in Delve/Blighted T16.5: https://youtu.be/hly89aGrjYU?si=wsHhcUYQoGmV-dgY

POB: https://pobb.in/z6PJ9OAGeSY2

POE Ninja: https://poe.ninja/builds/mercenaries/character/Kingg_Q-3387/Eleanor_Nightingale?i=53&search=masteries%3D!Each%2BMine%2Bapplies%2B2%2525%2Bincreased%2BDamage%2Btaken%2Bto%2BEnemies%2Bnear%2Bit%252Cup%2Bto%2B10%2525%26type%3Ddepthsolo%26class%3DElementalist%26sort%3Ddepth

Why Hydrosphere? Well, every league since I started (affliction) I found I really enjoyed the skill and think it's a lot of fun to play around with and keep trying to expand and up the ante on its potential as a main skill rather than abusing on-hit mechanics.

Ordinarily, I play it until I get a bit exhausted and leading up to 3.26 I found that power siphon in a CoC or Spellslinger would solve the one major issue with hydrosphere (aside from limited scaling): auto targeting. It felt buttery smooth but I had no idea if it'd actually pan out in reality. Decided to league start hydrosphere from level 34 and work my way up from there. Eventually transitioned to abyss stacking since I wanted to play around with the build restraints and try to do something different each league.

Transitioned to abyss stacking with Hybrid Life/ES + Mana at around level 80 and things were good. Eventually got the point where my damage and single target was lackluster without stacks. Crafted my gloves, swapped to CI at around 88 and added the CoC setup and it only went up from there.

Power Siphon provides a lot of great things for the build, on top of auto-targetting for Hydrosphere:

Source of Cull

Source of power charges

Easy Crit capping, so can take strong spell crit % affixes

Thanks to abyss jewel phys as extra, can proc ailments on hydrosphere

Vaal power siphon to easily apply ignite to all nearby enemies for Shaper of Flame

Access to Mana Leech

Can swap conc effect for fork when you dont need the damage and want more clear

Spellslinger Tornado of elemental Turbulance:

ToET is one of the only other persistent physical damage spells in the game which doesn't scale off cast speed. It scales in similar ways to Hydrosphere due to Orb tag, so it slots in nicely to bump up both single target damage and clear speed. Spellslinger allows us to not have to manually cast it, and we also don't have to give up hydrosphere damage by putting it into the CoC link.

It also provides 12 additional hits per second allowing for more instances of leech (and therefore instant leech).

It will re-proc hydrosphere ailments should powersiphon not do the job.

This will slot into the wand sockets to eventually take advantage of the Crit Strike links.

I swap in/out enfeeble or assassin's mark depending on the fight but could also slot in a damage link if it seems worth it.

Offense Scaling:

Crit Multi

Abyss Jewel Phys as extra% + Ele Pen (Head/Body)

Ailment effect for shocks

Ailment stacking for Taming

Exposure%

Attack speed (up to CoC cooldown cap)

Flat added Phys

Merc Setup:

Manyshot with Grace, Vaal Grace and Hatred

Leercast

Cospri will for additional curse (eventually)

Squirming ring for stack uptime and doubles for using on-kill effects

Call of the Void + Ahuana's bite for Chill Synergy

Rashklador's for Ailments

Painseeker + On hit Ele weakness for damage + Ailment effect

Scorch boots

Koam's

Defenses:

Flat ES on abyss jewels to make up for lack of ES on Head/Body/Boots

Enough evasion with flasks + grace to avoid a good amount of hits

Block + Recovery on hit block for anything that sneaks through

Phys conversion w/ Koams + Shaper of flame

Endurance charges from accumulator wand (slightly inconsistent)

Bastion of elements was a gamechanger when I swapped

Plan on continuing to min/max from here but felt fleshed out enough to make a post about it, more than happy with how this worked out considering I'm playing hydrosphere. Need to finish crafting my wand (Working on the veil prefix...), and then figure out how else i can squeeze some damage out without sacrificing defenses. Open to suggestions and I think my POB configs are realistic but if it's not just let me know!

I primarily delve and tend to skew all my builds towards that (if you couldn't tell). Currently at depth 520 with no issues, looking to get to 600 and see how it goes from there as my damage is finally starting to fall off.