Trying to make Bladefall work in 3.25. A retrospective on a homebrew CoC Bladefall of Volleys Trickster

This league I wanted to make a build that met the following criteria:

• Homemade
• Uses Bladefall
• Can do endgame content
• ~20 Div budget

Why Bladefall?
Ever since the skill was released I thought it was thematically really cool. It also helps that on release the skill was very strong. It's seen success self casted and used in traps for poison builds. It looks awesome, sounds awesome and feels awesome. The problem for building around Bladefall in 3.25 is the skill... well... sucks. The damage is low and a glance at poe.ninja shows that no one is really trying to make it work. Enter Bladefall of Volleys. Bladefall of Volleys release with transfigured gems and largely flew under the radar, mostly due to low paper damage numbers and being outshined by other game changing new gems. But it has an intriguing tag that volleys can overlap. Anyone who played frostwall KB or Fireball in the past is probably excited at that concept. So I set to trying to make it work.

CoC Envy
I wanted to try the Holy Relic lancing steel of spraying CoC build at some point, but instead I thought I'd try to get lancing steel of spraying into this build instead. Since the whole idea of this build is what I enjoy (not what functions best) I built a CI Trickster which is my favorite Ascendency. This lead to a huge issue though, how the FUCK do I sustain the CoC mana cost without eldrich battery? The answer is... not well, at least without investment. I had to take NINE passive skill points on my tree to make it work. 3 leech nodes which aren't even energy leach. The attack leech nodes with lancing steel ended up being essential. Then there are two mana clusters, one for reduced mana cost of attacks and one fore mana res efficiency. Since I couldn't give up any damage on a weaker skill, the opportunity cost of this is that I have ZERO spell suppression. I'm sure with greater investment I could get it there, but in my 20ish divs it wasn't going to happen. The attack speed and crit was actually easier to acheive than I though it would be as you'll see from my weapon, but you'll also notice I have no other damage mods on there. All-in-all the cast on crit functionality works in this build and leads to very fun sky explosions of swords.

Functioning in EnDgAmE
This build is working in endgame... sort of. I'm happily blasting through T16 maps, mostly running delirium mirrors. I've gotten 3 voidstones, but don't see it killing Maven. The damage is simply too low. If I spent the time to pack on more levels and tune more things it's possible, but the build is already feeling likes it's close to it's limit. Endgame is also a moving target in POE. Being able to clear T16s no longer feels satisfactory. I can't give maps as much juice as I'd like and tier 17s are not really happening (cleared one or two with no boss kill). My resistance against the meta with this build had great upside in fun and originality for me, at the cost of not being able to do the things that I want to do.

Where do I go from here?
Unfortunately, back to something more tried and true. I'll painfully attempt to sell of some niche gear and make yet another int stack wander, which I do love, but is a dime a dozen.

Ok great, let's see your underperforming build
Here it is in all it's glory. Please be kind, I'm not a PoE pro or content creator, I just did this for fun and wanted to share something different.

Tier 16 map with no league content: Video
Pobbin: Here

Thanks for reading