[Frost Blades of Katabasis Slayer] Screen-wide melee range, 640%ms, 22aps, ~60k phys/ele/chaos max hit taken, 56m pinnacle dps.

PoB: https://pobb.in/jzBPo3SGvdj0

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZpf14vnv5s

Skipped the Wildwood/Deli Mirror since, as you can tell, my potato pc can barely handle what I recorded (multiple open breaches with 108 pack size and beyond + OBS = powerpoint)

My goal with this build was to make a well rounded mapper (with enough dps for bosses) that goes absurdly fast, make use of an underused alt gem (or completely unused in this case), and get the most value out of Charms/TWWT I could think of.

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In previous leagues I never spent the time to make my own builds from scratch, because there are so many fascinating builds lurking in the depths of poe.ninja/youtube. I would just pick the stuff I thought looked interesting/good, play something meta if that interested me, and make adjustments as I saw fit.

This league and next league are the last I can sink a ton of time into though, so I wanted to spend more time playing/PoB'ing in my last 2 leagues of heavy playtime. Wasted most of my time in the week leading up to launch planning a 100% success wave 13 Ultimatum farmer and checking out all the new gems/patch notes.

The one thing that did pay off in the end was testing Frost Blades of Katabasis.

It stuck out to me as a potential option when reading the gem info, since I enjoy Lightning Strike/Frost Blades (specifically Vengeant Cascade Frost Blades; haven't bothered with it since) type builds. But the fact of the matter is that it's literally just an auto attack, mechanically. It has the same damage effectiveness as Frost Blades, but trades off the entire projectile portion of the skill AND the 87-130 added cold damage (8million dps for this build!) for some extra range.

How is it possible to be worth it to give up 8million dps and a shit-ton of projectiles for "some extra range"? Well, maybe it's not lol. If you can get all the items together for the build, you might like it more as a Frost Blades/LS/Cobra Lash/Venom Gyre build.

As for what "some extra range" looks like, this is my melee strike range: https://imgur.com/a/L191wNH

On the distance image from the wiki (https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Distance#/media/File:Poe-units-72.jpg), 75 range is the biggest aoe circle shown, and this build has 84 range.

I knew the range would be juicy, since that's arguably the defining characteristic of Frost Blades and Katabasis triples it, but actually playing it was a different story. In a juiced map, I'm almost always directly hitting something off screen with my "melee" strikes.

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I guess in order to combat power creep and not dictate the meta so directly, instead of buffing skill gems, GGG has taken the stance of providing temporary player power via league specific mechanics:

Kalandra: Reflected Jewelry

Sentinel: Recombinators

These two were the start, but the paradigm shift becomes more clear afterwards:

Sanctum: Sanctified Relics+Lycia's Invocation

Crucible: Crucible Trees

Ancestor: Tattoos

Affliction: Wildwood Ascendancies

I'd say this league has by far the most temporary power on offer, in the form of charms (outside of a few Crucible outliers). If we look at what I get from charms+TWWT, it's pretty damn insane:

55 chaos res

Permanent Adrenaline (Lailloken UI or some other timer overlay helps with this, if you aren't doing naughty things)

Berserk with similar (better than a scuffed <10rage/s setup) uptime to pre-nerf Kaom's Spirit

22% ms

1% base crit

Stun immunity

Crit immunity

10% minimum shock (activated with 1 lightning dmg affix on a rare jewel)

Power charge generation (160% increased crit)

It feels like I'm lying listing all this shit and reading it over. But it's no exaggeration; that's what I get from charms+TWWT.

When I was initially planning the build, movement speed was a primary focus, and I assumed I was going to use 3 charms like this one (https://imgur.com/a/cBAR6tR), the first item I bought for the build.

I ended up using 0 of them. I didn't hard focus on MS at all. The 640%ms is more just a feature of the build. You could likely get over 1000 if you did go hard into it. Restless Ward is really the only big opportunity cost choice for MS, as a chest with big life/suppress/resEfficiency would be insane for the build (the resEfficiency would free up a charm prefix and the suppression would solve a lot of headaches).

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Aside from the charm setup, the fact that I'm using playing fucking Frost Blades of Katabasis Slayer (can hear Jung's groan typing that), there are some other details of my setup I think are neat:

I have 3509 life, and lvl 21 CF+lifetap costs 1755hp. If I had 1hp more, I wouldn't proc Adrenaline.

I really like the setup I have in my boots. Steelskin+EnduCry+Berserk+Enhance with a +1 gems corrupt. My enduring cry is on a 3.1 sec cooldown, Berserk 4.3, and the Berserk uptime I've had far exceeds my expectations. I would've been happy with 1 refresh per Berserk, but with my Endu cry cd, I often get 2-4. Uptime would be higher if I was less lazy, but I'm just spamming EnduCry.

As for the tree, I think it's a pretty straightforward tree. I guess some people would hate grabbing the Tribal Fury wheel and the Fortify wheel for a whopping 10 points. Imo the fortify charm is a bait and the uptime is shit for such an important defensive layer, whereas the fortify wheel has 100% uptime in combat. A lot like Herald of Ice (Celestial Herald of Ice is goated), I grabbed Tribal Fury+mastery for both aesthetics and clear, the former being considered more lol.

The build also has absolutely bonkers recovery. Originally thought it was overkill given that imperial claw builds often rely solely on the implicit, but the regen (1k regen, overleech, 3sec cd EnduCry) is really nice for trivializing Blood Rage and Corrupting Fever costs out of combat. Don't need CF for Wildwood anyways, as the build is way too fast to do it effectively lol.

Also with regards to Wildwood, while the MS is overkill for clearing it, it's really nice when backtrapping for wisps. After playing MF CA Pathfinder, backtracking the entire thing in a few seconds is like heaven.

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I had 400 Horrors to play with when crafting my ring, and settled for what I have after 50. I wanted Chaos Res and a single Omni roll, and not having Chaos Res (doubled obviously through Kalandra) put a lot of stress on jewels. I have chaos res on all clusters, and two rare jewels. Instead of relying on Progenesis and jewels, the build could get capped/near-capped easily with another affix on TWWT and the aforementioned roll on ring.

There's probably a better way to get Suppress capped (gloves, charms, idk), which would free up my annoint (Disciple of the Unyielding is a 10% dmg increase).

There are plenty of possible upgrades (build is under a mirror in this absurd wisp league, so that should be obvious), but the one I'll be going for with whatever currency I get the rest of the league is spamming Locks on my gloves for +1 Frenzy. Probably won't play too much more, even though the build is so fun to play, so I'd settle for attack crit or ele weakness as well.

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For budget, not too sure. Price when I got stuff (been farming towards this for 5-6 weeks, so prices change a lot): Mageblood (152div), Claw (115div, I hate crafting, ty whoever crafted it), Awakened Multi (60div), Enlighten (55div), and Watcher's Eye (was 70ish I think? can't remember), Frenzy ring (175div).

I didn't realize the stun immunity and adrenaline charms had such low weight, so those were pricier than expected (but "only" 20div and 18div, way cheaper via the long lasting live searches I had going).

Think I listed most stuff that was expensive. Some nice stuff like TWWT was only like 10div and my Lethal Pride was <10d (guess no one care about this spot/nodes).

Probably about 700-850div in total, but almost everything not widely available was bought via long-lasting live searches.

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Some numbers disclaimers. I use Awakened Ancestral Call while mapping and literally never place totems (should probably make use of those gem slots tbh ...), so the 56m is for bossing only, but I assume that's what most people care about.

The max hit is accurate I think, but includes both Steelskin and Berserk. They have high uptime, but worst-case max hit is a lot lower.

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Hope someone else enjoys the build. Looking forward to next league and seeing what kind of temporary power there is to play around with. Took me a while to catch on and become excited for that instead of being bummed about no skill gem balancing.