Blackflame Hexblast Occultist pretty good, wanting some feedback

Hexblast Mapping Simulacrum Bossing Harvest Essence

DPS: 845.23K
Life: 3.94K
Level: 95
Min budget

Overview

Blackflame Hexblast Occultist pretty good, wanting some feedback is a Path of Exile Occultist build by fromtheland__, made for the Ritual league (3.13). It is centered on Hexblast and plays as a intelligence, spell, area, chaos archetype. In Path of Building it reaches 845.23K DPS with 3.94K life, 1.95K energy shield. Suited for: Mapping, Simulacrum, Bossing, Harvest, Essence. Key uniques include Vixen's Entrapment, Rumi's Concoction, Carcass Jack, Blackflame.

fromtheland__'s Notes

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Prices estimated by looking at or purchasing similar items listed 1 month ago: Budget Version ---- Stats listed in approximate order of importance for each slot Shield: 10c Life, Resistances, Block, ES, Dexterity We DON'T need spell damage Wand: 5c +1 spell is best, +1 chaos very much fine, +1/+1 is BIS for wand Get +2 Gems, Fire DoT muli, DoT multi, increased Burning damage, increased fire damage I think +1 gems should be most important, but a very high Tier 2 or better Fire DoT might be as good if you can't find any combinations above Nice to have: crit chance, cast speed, mana, mana regen Any Elemental damage added makes us vulnerable to reflect. Added chaos damage or added chaos damage to spells is okay and kind of helpful. Added to attacks does nothing for us either way. Staff(Alt): BiS weapon will be +5 Chaos Gems staff, but probably not budget. +2 Spell Gems is better than +3 Chaos gems here. You'll want to move from shield charge to vigilant strike (which opens up a gem slot too!) See alternate tree with Staff block passives taken Get +2 Gems, Fire DoT muli, DoT multi, increased Burning damage, increased fire damage in that order Nice to have: crit chance, cast speed, mana, mana regen Any Elemental damage added makes us vulnerable to reflect. Added chaos damage or added chaos damage to spells is okay and kind of helpful. Added to attacks does nothing for us either way. Helmet: 1-5c Life, Resistances, Block, ES, Dexterity Not necessary, but easiest damage upgrade is Hunter -9 chaos res mod. 20c and up for Hunter Influenced -chaos res. Probably easier to buy orb or Harvest influence Hubris Circlet. Cost 1ex+. Amulet: 1-5c Dex or mana regen (Blue Pearl, Paua, Jade, Citrine, Turquoise, Onyx) Dexterity, Life, Resistances, Fire Damage, mana regen Note: Can essence craft this early on, and we can increase attributes stats with catalysts on jewellery but not on other equipment Blackflame: 5 - 15c REQUIRED UNIQUE Gives fire res and decent Chaos res Other Ring: 1c+ Dexterity, Life, Resistances, Fire Damage, mana regen Note: Can essence craft this early on, and we can increase attributes stats with catalysts on jewellery but not on other equipment Vixen's Entrapment Gloves: 10c-1ex (For one of Enfeeble, Vulnerability, Despair, or Temp Chians) REQUIRED UNIQUE Any corruption of the 4 is probably fine, so get cheapest. Self-cast curse will be strongest, so Enfeeble/Temp Chains for Defence, Vulnerability/Despair for Damage Alternate DPS focused version of the build uses an alt quality Flammability for up to 55 total doom with Enhance. In this case, you will NOT want Despair (1st most important) or Vulnerability (2nd) corruption. Life/ES/Res Sygian or Belt: 5c - 20c+ Just fill in resists, life, defences, stun/block recovery here MS/Life/ES/Res Boots: 5c-15c+ Movement speed and stats Optional viable boot enchantments (in approximate order): crit chance if haven't crit recently, life regen if hit recently, dodge spells/attack hits if you've taken spell/crit hit recently, Chance to Freeze/Shock/Ignite if haven't crit recently Intuitive Leap: 30c Not required, but saves 2-5 passive points that can go into Scion Circle of Life, Small clusters, or Divine Judgement path (No cluster jewels tree) Jewels (if possible with budget/passive tree): probably 1-10c for 1-2 mod combos, up to 1ex+ for Corrupted Blood or more mod combinations Corrupted Blood always a goal but expensive early. Get any jewel with this corruption implicit before a Sirus fight; no other stats can't out-weigh this mod in Sirus fight. Look for Fire DoT Multi, Burning Damage, Fire damage, Ignite chance + Burn duration, life, es, resists, attributes, etc For general mapping, other good corruption implicits would be #% increased damage, area damage, area of effect are all good Clusters: Note: We don't really need chaos resistance on these. Prioritize Dexterity, Life, and Damage if possible Large Fire Damage Cluster Jewel: Hard to estimate past prices. Currently .8-2exalts. Going to assume self-rolled for league start... Get ilvl 50-67! We don't need any Notables above 67. Upgrade for better small passives attributes if you want later 15-30c for 8 passive large cluster, unrolled. Trivial to get Burning Bright (ilvl 50-67, 5 scorched fossils), up to 500 tries to get 3 passives with this. Probably better to incrementally upgrade for more damage To be most efficient with passive points, you'll want 3 notables, with 1 that is not taken. for 2 notable clusters, we need to use another passive to take second notable x2 Medium Fire DoT Cluster Jewel (4-5 passives): Less than 50c, estimate 20-40 (50c listings never sold!). Can also consider the generac DoT medium clusters as alternate Want x2 Blowback (BiS dps) Average of 10 Scortched fossils to hit Blowback with another of the listed Notables on an ilvl 50-74 medium cluster. Should be easy/free with Harvest Fire/Defence/Life chaos spams (in order of success probability). Burning Bright is 2nd BiS for DPS Creamator is 3rd DPS, though corpse removal not really needed due to Profane Bloom Vile Reinvigoration, Flow of Life, Brush with Death are all highly reccomended as 2nd passives. They are well balanced between damage, regen, and EHP increases. Vile Reinvigoration and Brush with Death depend on kill, so not helpful in Conqueror or Sirus fights, and minimally helpful in other arenas. Brush with Death found on small cluster also Circling Oblivion is nice with #% increased DoT and Ailment Duration (more damage uptime while dodging arena stuffs) Smoking remains is potentially a good option for defence (smoke clouds blind mobs) Fan the Flames is option if you want to run Swift Affliction instead of Ignite Proliferation as 6th link. Trade a damage for extra clear in for harder mapping. Untested Armour Small Cluster: 10c? hard to estimate this one, but its OP, get it! 30-50c already rolled (60c-1ex jewels never sold) 13(17) Dense Fossils to roll yourself for ilvl 68(100). Probably easy with Harvest We only take this for Enduring Composure, so make sure its 2 passives. Get some extra stats on the small passive. Life Small Cluster: 5-20c 3 Passives best if you have extra points, 2 if you need an extra travel node in core tree (Fettle always a BiS if lucky) Brush with Death is BiS for damage (don't need it on Medium clusters if on small cluster) Total Budget Costs w/ clusters: 180c Conservative Estimate (330c worst case) Total Budget Costs w/o clusters: 80c Conservative Estimate (130c worst case) Note: Without small armour cluster, swap Vulnerability for Warlord's Mark for Endurance Charge generation (on-kill generation means less reliable with bosses) HARVEST CRAFTING GUIDES TBD

I wanted to mess around with Hexblast since it was announced but stayed away after some initial reviews. The new Blackflame unique along with damage effectiveness boost to Hexblast re-ignited (yeah I went there) my interest. I took some guidance from different places including Mathil, SmashinBob, Zyememe and poe.ninja.

I know reddit attention span is short, so feel free to skip ahead to the list, but I tried to cover everything I've tried so far. Lmk if PoB doesn't work, I also have notes on the gear in there. PoB: https://pastebin.com/KZzmmxia

Anyway, I wanted to get some more eyes on this build/tree. Right now I am doing Guardians averaging <1 deaths and can do their invitation (a couple deaths) on a 5-link and about 100c in gear. Most of that is in clusters, 5L Carcass Jack, and Intuitive Leap (which I might drop anyway). I can full clear juiced delirious maps with an Obliteration added for QoL, so far up to 40% now. I was able to get A5 to last phase on a 5L but I suck at that fight so I wasn't able to finish it, unfortunately. Will try again with a 6L.

The basic damage loop is: self-cast a curse (enfeeble or temp-chains), wait 0.04s-1.44s to accumulate up to max doom. Vixen's Entrapment also casts Despair + Vulnerability + another defensive curse (enfeeble or temp chians). Cast Hexblast. Hexblast hits, removes self-cast curse, and ignites the enemy which takes burning damage as chaos. Impending Doom support procs Doom Blast which hopefully crits, procing Elemental Overload. The hits re-apply the initially self-cast curse, at a lower effectiveness from an on-hit source for full up-time. Damage is boosted by increasing burning damage and chaos damage taken.

I am now thinking this could be a very viable league starter, so I am not trying to scale gear, since there are some very obvious upgrades. While technically a 2-button build, it feels significantly smoother than my BF/BB starter, due to naturally high cast speed.

The build is rather defensive (40k Max hit) due to self-cast Enfeeble/temp chains boosted by 40 doom, temp chains/enfeeble on hit, sand stance, endurance charge generation with Enduring Composure, CWDT + Immortal Call + Stone Golem, easy positive chaos res due to Occultist's Withering Presence, some block chance, elusive from Withering Step, more blind Disorienting Display and Smoking Remains, and Fortify from Shield Charge. I also can keep my distance until after enemy is weakened, and mobility is high. No defense is truly maxed out, but there's many layers. This is partly due to not really needing many sockets for damage -- that mostly comes from tree, gear, and gem levels. The other reason for so much defense is the crap gear I am forcing right now. Dropping Flesh and Stone for Skitterbots didn't feel as good, but could boost damage.

A couple of issues I am not sure about:

Not enough EO uptime. I have self-cast Enfeeble with Increased Critical Strikes + Impending Doom support, but the game does not indicate this is supported by ICC by highlighting its socket.
Ways to achieve similar results by cutting down on some cluster jewels to make things cheaper
Any obvious damage oversights. I haven't decided if stacking curse effect is the play here, and I've opted not to do that since its only ever a couple percent per passive point. See thoughts on wither below. Besides Despair and -chaos res to nearby enemies from ascendancy, there's really not any other way to reduce enemy chaos resistance (Hunter helm I assume is expensive early in league). Wither is the only way I know to increase chaos damage taken (Malediction too but can't scale?). The other damage scaling is fire/burning damage, fire DoT, ignite duration, of which there are plenty of different places to get that. PoB suggests that added chaos damage on initial hit isn't the play compared to fire/burning damage buffs.
Is lvl 4 Stone Golem worth it? Other options? Chaos Golem?
Ailment immunity would be nice but I don't see an obvious way to get it.
any other thoughts!

As long as Blackflame remains in the game and pretty cheap, I think this is a pretty viable league start.

Extra Theory and ramblings for the interested:

The way I understand it, the reason this build works so well, especially on uniques/bosses is that the reduced effect of curses is counteracted by Doom gain and the fact that damage is scaled by Wither, since burning damage is taken as chaos damage. Wither does not have decreased effectiveness against any monster type. Also, we can safely assume that Wither is at max stacks because it does not expire while the enemy is ignited and we also get increased Wither duration when going for 20% increased Wither effect on the Corruption notable. We get wither from Occultist ascendancy, Withering Step, and Wither Totem for back up. So, fire/burning damage modifiers boost damage that is "dealt" up front while low chaos, wither, and Malediction boosts damage taken on the back end (up to 124% incr chaos damage taken). Also ignites last a long time due to temp chains.

Self-casting Despair, in theory is stronger because 40 doom will increase its effectiveness by 40%, but in practice having to cast, blast, then cast again is clunky. At most it gives another 10% incr damage taken from an extra -4% chaos res. I will play with this more. There is a version of the build that uses Anomalous Flammability for 50 doom and being able to trade Combustion for Hypothermia + Skitterbots, and that might be where this build ends up in its expensive form.

I've seen temp-chains on blasphemy, but tried it and didn't find it necessary for mapping since its smooth already. Temp-chains on blasphemy is slightly more defensive and turns mapping into a 1-button experience, so its definitely an option if you can get a hold of Solstice Vigil. This leaves a gem slot for Flesh & Stone, so its a preference thing.

I don't take Doomsday because things just move around too much. With mobs on temp chains along with other defenses I can usually run around for the 1.44s it takes to reach max Doom and not have to worry about where I placed the hex, and I can spam Hexblast right after applying curse while mapping which is plenty of damage.

With a curse on hit anywhere in the build, that curse will be the one we self-cast since it is automatically reapplied when Hexblast hits (using Enfeeble now). While do-able, Despair or Vulnerability on hit are sub-optimal for DPS since a high level gem has higher curse effectiveness; going for enfeeble or temp chains on hit is preferable.

We can do most map mods including reflect. The only one that doesn't feel good is ailment avoidance for obvious reasons. Its "doable" if there's no other option but you have to spam the heck out of Hexblast to get an ignite to stick.

I might drop Profane Bloom for Vile Bastion for more comfortable bossing (stun immunity), but I love those pops.