Wormblaster 2022 (Experimental)

Update: New pob. https://pobb.in/7EAgNcbXfJEY

TL;DR: A lot of scaling doesn't work as intended, we crit ambush now. Estimated damage is 2.2m on average, with a possible ~200k plague bearer.

Basics of how it works

Step 1: Curse target boss with Despair and apply wither.

Step 2: Ambush to the target.

Step 3: Spawn worms with flask (1 use is enough) and drink diamond flask.

Step 4: Focus if you can.

Step 5: Hit the worms either manually or with "stike additional nearby enemy."

Step 6: Maintain wither and Despair until ambush is available again. Then repeat.

Worms spawned from flask are hit with Pestilent strike, exploding for half of their total remaining poison damage (which is always 100% of the applied poison) to nearby enemies for ~2 seconds.

Changes

I have tested in-game with Plague barrier, what "expected poison damage" means. I believe that this value is the un-buffed poison damage, multiplied by duration unaffected by temporal chains. That means applying wither and temporal chains to the worms is a useless endeavor.

This dramatically limits the scaling of this build. That being said, perfect agony should be able to scale it as an alternative, and we can re-allocate all 6 curse effect jewels to defensives.

We may have far less damage than expected, but it is mostly mechanically sound with no immediately glaring flaws that would reduce the expected damage. There is a slight problem with our flask sustain, but nothing that bringing 2 crit flasks and 2 worm flasks wouldn't fix.

Current DPS

Our current expected damage for the initial poison is 3.4 million total. Half of this will be turned into a DoT, for a total of 1.7 million base chaos damage per second.

Setting our target to gradian/pinnacle, we now apply the following debuffs: Despair and 15 stacks of wither. This will be an effective dps multiplier of 1.564 versus the boss. Our expected damage per second is ~2.66 million dps.

Without focus, however, our inital poison damage is 2.2 million; approximately 2/3d of the damage. This should carry all the way through, giving us a non-focus dps of ~1.72 million.

Hyperboreus means we can have 50% up-time on our focus, which means our true dps is the average of those two different dps, giving us a total dps of about 2.2 million.

Our pestilence strike has a duration of 2.046 seconds. With Enlighten lvl 4, Our ambush has the exact same cooldown, meaning we can always assume we have it to calculate our DPS.

This isn't including Plague Bearer, which can provide over 250k dps (or somewhere along those lines? Not to sure.)

More Scaling?

We can squeeze a bit more dps with corruptions for an extra curse. One of our rings could also Shock nearby enemies on hit, though we are very much constrained due to our attribute requirements.

Obviously, we have 2 5-passive voices that could be improved.

Anything after that thoroughly enters the realm of PoB warrioring.

What do I think of it?

Not enough damage for the chunkiness to be worth while, and not tanky enough to be able to execute its jank comfortably.

The DPS -is- passive technically, which means we will have good sustain vs bosses. And with a 3.4 million expected damage poison, we will always have Plague Spreader at maximum power for clearing.

I personally wouldn't consider playing this, but just the fact that there is a worm-based build out there that is at least playable is very satisfying for me as a build creator.

In short, it is a playable meme build.

Calculating DPS

The dps of this build is calculated like so, if you want to do this yourself.

Take the total damage per poison, configured to be against a worm cursed only with assassins' mark and with 0 wither on it. Divide that number by 2.

Swap the configuration to Gardian/pinnacle boss. Apply 15 wither and Despair curse. Go to the "poison" tap in the calculations window and grab the effective DPS mod for poison.

Multiply the first number by the second effective DPS mod. That will be your DPS.