One for the road: LSoS-CoC-BVotS-BBoU Occultist

Video demo
PoB

This is a build that, considering it might be left as my last PoE1 creation, I'm happy with. The idea started when looking at the runecrafts list: there's a stupidly expensive option for +2 all spell gems on 2H swords. It felt like a challenge to use it somehow. After all, surely a staff with a +2 mod and one of the cool staff enchants would be better?

It seemed like the best way to use this would be in a shaper-sword CoC build using Lancing Steel of Spraying. The trick is that it hits every 72ms, meaning if you reduce the cast on crit cooldown below 144ms, it'll alternate between two skills with very little wasted cooldown time. Last league's broken DD variant is dead, but... maybe some other two-skill combo? Like bladefall-blade blast? Hmm, wait. Blade Vortex of the Scythe hits once as soon as it's cast. Then, Blade Blast of Unloading can detonate it on the next CoC proc, allowing the pseudo-cooldown BVotS has to be bypassed, since there's no active blade to prevent the next one from dealing a hit when cast. These skills have some pretty appealing damage numbers, too.

I considered a few builds with this idea. Poison Assassin. Cold conversion Inquisitor. Tried the latter, but found it a bit awkward - dependent on Heralds for clear and very fragile. Finally settled on Occultist. Since we're planning to crit a lot, we can use the cluster jewel notable Overwhelming Malice to have near-constant 100% chaos conversion and free wither stacks. This mostly solves the problem of BBoU's terrible AoE when only using one blade, since we can scale Profane Bloom and use a curse-on-hit ring to propagate explosions. Anathema lets me use my favourite defence, Blasphemy-Temporal Chains-Enfeeble, and Occultist's good chaos res makes Divine Flesh and Incandescent Heart an easy pickup. There's enough sockets open to run some Guardian's Blessing Dark Marionettes, although the resulting uptime for a defensive aura is a bit sketchy.

To be honest, the result is... Maybe not great. Anything with Profane Bloom can clear, and the single target is at best so-so. Definitely weaker than my straightforward archmage build. There's some space for improvements, sure. +2 ammy. Gloves on a decent base. Another couple levels. But, the way it all came together like a puzzle - to me, that's what makes PoE builds, and r/PathOfExileBuilds, special. Thanks for all the inspiration. It's been a blast.