Cast on Ward Break will be missed [silly project]

hello, and welcome to project voltaxic burst!

Thanks to Ilucia from discord for improving and playing the second character and making this possible.

main PoB: https://pobb.in/wQkdZ9apJg16
freeze/malevolence bot: https://pobb.in/ctI_h7wgsZUV

Voltaxic burst is a spell that waits for some duration and then explodes. The more bursts are currently waiting, the more damage it deals. This makes it my favorite skill in the game, as it scales quadratically with cast speed. But more importantly for today, the number of waiting bursts is shown on an icon in the buff bar! And today, this number go big. That is all.

How do we scale the number? We can use duration to make the queued casts last longer, and cast rate to make more of them. It is not affected by expiry rate modifiers like temporal chains, as voltaxic burst queues, it doesn't expire.

Duration is scaled by getting duration nodes, there's not much to it. what's more interesting is the cast/trigger rate.

In previous leagues, the best way to scale casts per second was... cast speed. Manual casting is capped at one cast per game tick per repeat, which means that if you go into PoB and set infinite cast speed, you will cap out at 30.3 casts per second. If you add greater spell echo for +2 repeats, you reach 90.91. If you also have echoing shrine with at least 200% increased shrine effect from volatile vaaled gull, blunderbore and 2 ichimonjis, you will have 1+5 repeats and 181.82 casts per second. This is the highest you can go with manual casting, no matter how much cast speed you have.

Triggers are relatively terrible in comparison. No matter how much cooldown recovery you have, you can't trigger more than once per game tick, that is 30.3 per second. Mirage league and cast on ward break has finally made it possible to reach this number, but even so, this is the limit.

So why does the thumbnail show Cast on Ward Break? It's not about triggering voltaxic burst 30 times per second. It's about triggering brand recall. When you do this with saboteur's triggerbots, you will get two brand recalls. Each will recall your arcanist brands, causing them to trigger the linked spell twice because of triggerbots. The result is 4 triggers per brand - we have 10 brands, so that's 40 stacks of voltaxic burst every time we trigger brand recall.

CoWB has this funny line "Supported Spells have 5% increased Cooldown Recovery Rate per 100 Ward". A normal skill will have 1 second base cooldown from CoWB, and to get it to the minimum cooldown of 1 game tick, you need 58700 ward. this is realistic for a normal build to do, with high enough budget. brand recall has 4 seconds base cooldown, which is 4 times more. to get it to 1 gt cooldown, one would need about 240k ward.

240k is a lot of ward. I could settle for less, or...

Bonemeld is an amulet that gives 4% increased defenses per active minion. Defenses means ward. Volatile vaal orb gets this up to 5%, and then it can be brought to 6% by a catalyst. If we use all the minion skills, we get a lot of increased ward. about 2100% increased ward from bonemeld alone in this case.

The most important minion by far is raise zombie of falling. It has a base minion limit of 200, which we can scale further with congregation. the bad news is that these zombies use a skill that kills them after about 13.6 game ticks, making it difficult to reach this limit.

If only there were some way to stop something from using a skill...

The second character, played by Iluca, uses ice nova of deep freeze. If the zombie is frozen, it can't kill itself. If it can't kill itself, we reach the minion limit. GG noobs.

Low level zombies ensure long freeze duration, pacifism support ensures that the zombies aren't killed. Iluca's character also scales aura effect in every possible way and shares a malevolence aura via runegraft of treachery for increased skill effect duration.

Highest number reached: 36.5k
duration: 23.595s
-> cast rate: 1547 casts per second