My take on the Hexblast / Impending Doom Occultist

As soon as I saw the new unique Anathema ring, a single question formed in my mind: How many curses can I force on a character with moderate success? The answer seems to be around 6 before it gets ridiculous, and it's probably the strongest build I've done in a long time, for a pretty low price. To keep this in perspective, I have no strategy whatsoever to make money and probably rack up like 10 divines through the entire league. I wanna say this is easily doable under 5 divines, or even for 1 divine budget since I cleared T14 maps with two 5links.

https://pobb.in/75j6eK0_KzmW

Imo this is a pretty generous pob in terms of configuration, only ticking "insane", power charges and 7 Wither stacks from Withering Step. You'll probably have more due to occultist ascendancy. Also, here is a shitty video I made for a friend showcasing an even shittier T16 map clear.

https://youtu.be/QPPPhi7ld6M

If there's demand I could make a clip of killing some guardians or whatever

https://youtu.be/wR2Cy4d5Z8E

Had to mute video cause I was talking to a friend and I'm too mentally deficient to setup a separate audio channel

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The only thing you need to get going is Anathemas, which was about 50c when I bought it. Vixen gloves are always cheap and shouldn't be an issue to get. Leveling itself with 2 doedre rings and tabula was an absolute breeze.

The builds gameplay revolves around spamming Despair with Impending Doom, Spell Cascade and Cursed Ground support. You've probably seen this interaction before, it makes the ground explode cause there can only be one field, so spell cascade is the ideal support. If you have spare currency, awakened spell cascade will be a huge upgrade to this.

Since we have 6 power charges, we can apply 6 curses to the enemy. We utilize this to absolutely sauce every enemy with all illnesses known to man. Self casting Despair in the main link will auto cast Punishment, Temporal Chains and Enfeeble. All of these will slow down enemies to a crawl and make them considerably weaker, which is a good defense for our very frail body. The new Hex bloom support spreads all 3 curses to every enemy, further increasing our survivability and obliterating my framerate. For bosses I self cast Assassins mark cause this is a crit focused build after all.

For tough enemies or bosses we use Unleash Hexblast, which completely nukes enemies if it crits. T16 Sanctum guards get oneshot by this no problem. I honestly don't even know how to calculate the damage, Unleash with its +1 mastery lets us remove 4 curses instantly which I assume does good damage cause it surely looks like it.

Getting a +1 max power charge on your helmet brings us to 6, and lets you get elemental weakness corruption on your gloves. Both of these options are super cheap because nobody uses Doedres Scorn, our helmet. It gives us a pretty hefty damage boost cause of the unreal amount of curses we use, there might be better options though. I spent 40c for both of these items. Getting this is absolutely not necessary I just thought it was funny.

Boots, Amulet, Ring 2 and Belt are standard rares with lots of ele res and life because I am a unique andy. I also use Purity of Elements to cap out my resistances and because i like the QoL of not having to deal with ailments. For chest I use Doppelganger Guise simply because it gives a load of crit and because I like destroy on hit. Makes it even safer, more QoL.

Furthermore, the new unique jewel Balance of Terror lets us completely ignore every curse because we spam Despair. Militant Faith Dominus for power charge damage.

Once again, if you have spare currency you can allocate Vile Bastion with Forbidden Jewels and path to Profane Bloom. I don't use this, I simply use Vile Bastion and haven't tried Profane Bloom myself. There's no real reason in my opinion, our clear is already excellent and imo very satisfying thanks to Doppelgangers destroy.

The new curse mastery gives us unreal amounts of sustain because of all the curse spreading we do. We also have some decent life recoup on the tree. This is, by all means, a super squishy build, sitting at a pathetic 3.7k hp. Despite this, I have no problems clearing T16 maps and Conquerors. I am assuming you can't do Uber content with this though. So essentially, our sustain is amazing, enemies have a hard time even reaching you or straight up miss, but you will sometimes just combust.

To cope with our insane mana cost I use Eldritch Battery, and we usually have enough ES leech from Vixen's to sustain. I also MoM since it makes you considerably tankier, but it gets awkward sometimes when you have DoT on you and you have no ES to do anything (which is why I take the Abberath pantheon for burning ground).

Additionally, there's not many map mods that are seriously dangerous to us. I honestly have not tried hex proof mobs yet but I assume it's pretty rough so I wouldn't recommend. No leech or reduced recovery is very possible but kinda aids.

This is a super rough first WIP of a build but it works surprisingly well. Probs alot of room for improvement and changes. If you have any questions I'll do my best to answer them. Or rip me to shreds, I'll still read it.