So Discharge is one of my favourite spells. But there's mostly two standard ways of doing discharge builds; using (Replica) Farrul's Fur, or cheesing it with Ralakesh's Impatience, and that doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity. However, there is now a third way!

One of the Link masteries is ‘Linked targets share Endurance, Power and Frenzy charges with you’. What if we linked to a minion that generated charges for us? Long story short; this works, and it also works with increased charge numbers, regardless of the minion's maximum charge limits.

(tl;dr: dervish minions can generate up to your max power/frenzy charges via link skills, this can be used with discharge and is possibly not bad but requires more damage; pob here https://pobb.in/58v7bIFnJxAa ).

Usually, if you link to a minion, it'll kill you when it despawns or dies. You can link to minions by the Minion Defence mastery, but using it on anything ethereal like SRS or skeletons is a guaranteed suicide pact. It theoretically could work better on more permanent minions, like AG or spectres. But the one minion that won't kill you is the Dancing Dervish minions from the Dancing Dervish sword. Now luckily, these are also very fast attacking minions, so we can take advantage of that for some charge generation.

The easiest charge to generate is power charges; Power Charge on Crit support in the sword is easy. Garnish with Increased Critical support if necessary. But what about other charges? Neither of the others have convenient supports to make them (apart from Endurance Charge on Melee Stun, but the stun threshold means this only works on small white mobs).

I've chosen to use Badge of the Brotherhood along with Poacher's Mark, which is at 20% quality with an Enhance support, to give a 9% chance to give a frenzy charge on hit. This is supported by Intuitive Link, so that I cast it every 0.5 seconds while the dervishes spin around, hopefully giving them a constant poacher's marked enemy to generate charges with. This… mostly works, in my testing, but it's less consistently reliable than the power charges. I wish there were easier ways to get the quality of the poacher's mark gem up, which would improve this drastically.

So now we have a minion that gives us free power and frenzy charges, build done? No… unfortunately, when the minions are out, we count as unarmed, so we lose a massive chunk of damage by not being able to equip weapons. We can weapon swap, but that despawns the dervishes, so that doesn't work. Most discharge builds will run 2x Void Battery, or one Battery and a Malachai's Loop, but we simply can't. The way I've tried to get around this is by using Occultist (in my pob, I know the prototype character in the video is an Elementalist) to get +1 power charge and some power charge scaling. I'm also using another link mastery, which gives enemies near linked targets exposure (or alternatively, using hydrosphere to inflict exposure) and stealing the Elementalist exposure mastery with FF jewels. This certainly helps with the damage, but from my pob experiments it doesn't really come close to the 40mill+ range of damage; the prototype pob I have now is around 8-10mill per discharge hit.

So can we take this any further? There aren't many other skills that consume charges (Vigilant Strike and Flicker Strike both require weapons so don't work here) so I'm not sure how else to take advantage of this great little link interaction, but please let me know if you have any ideas.

I'll be streaming this (or other wacky build science) on my stream at https://twitch.tv/kapectas for most of this weekend.