I started this league playing nebulis storm burst inquis. Loved it, farmed sims for a while and posted a guide on here, then kind of hit a wall. Eventually I decided to swap to something else to scale towards ubers, but wanted to keep the same setup with phys -> light -> cold conversion and reap was the hot new thing at that time. Said "why not", swapped my glove craft and implicit to 50% light conversion, and could not have been more impressed with the results.

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Uber Sirus (eternal struggle / older version)- https://youtu.be/LL--mNtNKe4

Uber Shaper (I'm bad at PoE) - https://youtu.be/KuMYUGDIoaw

Videos are without proper lab enchants yet, so no chill is being applied and curse / suppress are not capped.

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https://pastebin.com/RbpvNa2T

103M burst boss dps, 122M while mapping, could go higher if I was willing to keep minmaxing. At this point I have 110-180k max hit for anything except chaos, capped suppress, capped glancing blows block and spellblock, 105% reduced curses, 1k es on block, and can molten shell through uber sirus meteor, uber shaper slam, or theoretically normal maven memory game (not tested). Compared to the uberdan build, this does more damage for less cost BUT this can die in uber fights where you mess up royally, ie standing in a sirus storm spawn or not molten shelling an uber shaper slam. Dan's build literally cannot be killed under most circumstances with its insane regen and MUCH larger life pool. This version also probably maps faster due to fanaticism aoe spikes, but is less consistent for the same reason.

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Budget was around 350ex altogether, but it can be played somewhere from 50-80ex with a good hunter stygian vise and aura effect eternal struggle amulet. The only absolute *requirements* are +str gems body armor and woke spell cascade. The amulet was 20ex total, gloves about 10 but should have been cheaper if I had made them for this build specifically (as in no shock suffix). Body I bought for 75, not sure what that should actually cost as the market for those 3 suffixes is basically nonexistant below mirror tier.

Budget/WIP PoB for proof of concept https://pastebin.com/zSpPTcCQ - This is right after swapping from storm burst, not the greatest point to PoB but it serves as proof of concept that at various stages of investment the durability holds and most of the scaling is purely damage increasing.

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Alright, I'm not gonna get into how nebulis + aegis works as everyone's seen that before, so now let's jump into the jank tech that sets this apart:

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Fanaticism. Hear me out. Playing low life with reap and a divine blessing + lifetap link is not normally a great idea. HOWEVER, fanaticism lets us way over-reserve mana AND use both of these high life costs without needing crazy regen to offset. Combined with tireless we have 10% costs while it is up, and this means we can cast hatred on life for virtually free far more often than we need to have permanent uptime. The AoE helps clear greatly, while the cast speed is huge dps and also offsets the ramp of 6 blood charges and 4 intensify massively. I tried this as a meme bc the set was less than an ex, and it worked so well I just kept going. There's downtime in the damage boost, but the nova window is pretty significant. If you absolutely hate it you still get 70m dps with harmony of purpose, 67 with arcane blessing, or 64 with augury of penitence.

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Galesight gives brittle at NO cost to other ailments thanks to commandment of spite, and helm is a pretty mediocre slot for us anyways so it's perfect. Getting leech as a double corrupt takes the build from "really tanky" to "braindead". I was using a reservation efficiency (essence + implicit) helm with chaos res and suppress, galesight comes out to almost the same mana res but gives brittle and leech instead. Leadership's price is the "meta" brittle source, but I plan to use aegis anyways so I don't need the maxres and scorch + pen is too many affixes for full double conversion to use.

Side note: In theory, you could run inward eye and SoS instead; you gain a bit of life but would lose dps overall due to losing shock (12-15% on uber bosses). I consider it a downgrade given the higher opportunity cost to do so. You can also crit cap without brittle but need frost shield + diamond flask + assassin's mark on the target to do so without bottled faith up which is horribly inconsistent.

By not running leadership's price I get to use a +2 amulet with crit multi, this is leagues above scorch. A MUCH cheaper option that is surprisingly quite competitive is eternal struggle. Block, aura effect, a shitton of attributes, some global defenses, and 18% more damage via cull is a really great amulet for most situations. I left mine on the PoB, just take the "/" out of the config line with the cull damage calc to mock it properly. If I was luckier I would have crusader slammed and hit spell block on this amulet, freeing up my anoint for heartseeker or storm weaver, but I'm not willing to recraft to force that to happen.

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Jewels are niche but not unheard of. Impossible escape conduit is underrated, arguably the best option if you don't need CI for whispers of doom or imbalanced guard for maxres. Green nightmare is pretty perfect for any glancing blows build using suppress and cold damage, and a high frenzy charge on kill chance is always a plus.

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Overall I'm well aware both reap and nebulis conversion are tried and true build-arounds at this point, but this was a pretty big departure from any version of either I'd ever seen, and the first time I've hit 100m dps on a homebrew build even if it's not permanent uptime there. Eldritch implicits really make phys spells insane with conversion, I'm sure this could be adapted to EK with some work too. Now to take a month trying to get tectonic slam through ubers, and then to revive the energy blade dream in 3.19.