Hey all, Surgeon General here.

One of my PoE white whales is the synergy between Lightpoacher and Disintegrator. For the uninitiated, this combination encourages stacking elder/shaper items and abyss jewels is very tempting because:

• Disintegrator adds 350 base physical damage to spells via Battlemage

• Disintegrator adds another 50-100 base physical damage via siphoning charges

• Lightpoacher takes all that physical damage and grants 5% of physical damage as extra damage of each element per spirit charge (x10-15 on dedicated builds)

• Disintegrator then grants 4% of non-chaos damage as extra chaos damage per siphoning charge

The synergy between Battlemage, phys as extra elemental, and non-chaos as extra chaos can multiply your base damage by a factor of 5-10 depending on your setup.

I’ve tried building around this interaction for a few years but it’s never been viable because of the downsides on Lightpoacher and Disintegrator.

The Problems:

Lightpoacher wastes spirit charges every time you use a skill and forces you to generate them on-kill (thus you need a worm flask and charge generation for bosses). There are workarounds for this on the wiki, but it’s a pain and has a high opportunity cost.

Disintegrator is even worse. You need the siphoning charges and they’re generated at a 25% rate whenever you use a skill. However, you also take a hefty physical degen if you’ve used a skill in the past 4 seconds. If you’re stacking elder/shaper items (as you should), you’ll be taking 750-1000 physical damage per second. This forces you to build generic PDR and taxes your recovery to offset the remainder of the degen.

Basically, it’s been non-viable to build around this in previous leagues.

However, there’s a work-around with the introduction of Mercenaries that completely circumvents these downsides.

The Tech:

Supreme Grandstanding is a timeless jewel keystone that makes you “share” charges with nearby allies (note the different wording compared to Conduit which does not work with mercenaries).  Functionally, taking this keystone on our character makes it so that whenever our mercenary generates a charge, we will also gain one.

Importantly, this behaviour extends to all charges, not just the standard 3.  We can give our mercenary a copy of Hale Negator which causes them (and therefore us) to passively generate one spirit charge per second.  We can also give the mercenary their own copy of Disintegrator. This will make them (and again us) have a chance to generate a siphoning charge whenever the mercenary uses a skill.

We’ve turned the mercenary into a charge generation machine.  But how does this prevent the downsides of Lightpoacher and Disintegrator?

Note that both negative effects proc “when you use a skill.”  We have already have hands-off charge generation taken care of so then as long as we never use a skill, we will never activate those negative effects.

The follow up question is “how do you deal damage without using a skill?”

Method A:

Triggering skills does not “count” as skill use. If all of our skills are triggered, those downsides will never proc. This suggests setting up a cast-when-stunned or cast-when-damage-taken character. Both are viable; neither of the uniques used for this tech compete with the required uniques for common CWS or CWDT builds.

CWS is already a very popular archetype. Additionally, all of the flat damage from Battlemage and abyss jewel stacking would help overcome the low gem level requirements for lvl1 CWDT and give you a quite fast trigger rate. 

In my opinion, this is the better (read: more damage) approach if you want to implement the tech.

Method B:

The second option takes advantage of a new skill gem with unique behaviour: Bladefall of Trarthus. Unlike almost all other skill gems, this skill has a % per second mana cost and deals hit damage around the character on timed intervals, continuously, forever. There is no duration on BFoT; you turn it on at the start of the map and it will stay up as long as you can afford the mana cost. Since its always on, you never need to use a skill and you won’t proc the downsides of the uniques.

The base damage on BFoT is pretty bad but is made viable by the flat / added damage from the above tech. I’ve managed to put together a zero-button (mandatory) ignite autobomber using this skill. It’s been very comfy for farming 8mod Toxic Sewers with Div Scarabs of the Cloister. Pay no attention to the phys max hit: this character is designed just for high density speed clearing 8mod T16s.

I’ve been wanting to build around this interaction for literally years and it hasn’t “made sense” until this league since we can now use a mercenary to get around the opportunity cost that you would otherwise need to pay to enable the mechanics. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

TLDR: Give a mercenary Hale Negator and Disintegrator and use them to generate siphoning and spirit charges for you via Supreme Grandstanding (on your own character). Stack up those charges to get a bunch of “damage gained as extra.”  The mechanics require an autobomber playstyle but those are fun and the archetypes already exist.