Animate Guardian Gear:
dying breath --- upgrade into sign of the sin eater --- upgrade into kingmaker
leer cast --- upgrade into crown of the tyrant with a blue socket
bloodbond --- upgrade into gruthkul's pelt
intimidate/culling strike gloves with lots of res --- upgrade into vixen's entrapment with corrupted curse on hit (any beneficial curse is fine, at high end it's your choice between ele weakness and enfeeble)
sapped ground boots with lots of res
order of support gems in main links:
if you only have a 4 link:
trinity --- nightblade --- added cold damage
if you have a 5 link
trinity --- nightblade --- added cold damage --- inspiration support
if you have a 6 link
trinity --- nightblade --- added cold damage --- inspiration support --- elemental damage with attacks
Once you have a very high eDPS claw, level 21 anger and a blizzard crown, then go and import your own build into pob and see if increased critical damage is a damage boost.
If added cold and crit damage give the same dps, stay with added cold. Eventually as your gear gets better and you have more flat damage from stuff like abyss jewels, increased critical damage will start to outpace added cold damage by FAR.
With precision, level it up until you have around 80-100 mana remaining. You can get more aggressive with reservation space once you have the -mana cost craft on your rings.
Even then, don't reserve every single last bit of mana. Leave at least 50 mana remaining for your tinctures to burn through during downtime when you're in no-regen maps.
WARNING: Do not reduce the mana cost of static strike to zero with the -mana cost craft. You need to spend mana in order to generate inspiration charges. Decrease the cost to 1 mana at minimum.
Keep whirling blades and frostblink at level 1. They should cost zero mana once you have the -mana cost craft. This is important for ensuring tincture uptime in no-regen maps.
The suggested levelling setup takes 16 regret points to spec out of. If you didn't kill boulderback, you'll have to respec two of those points with gold (or random orbs of regret if you get any during the campaign).
If you want, you can start as a deadeye instead and take gathering winds (do NOT spec any other ascendancy nodes). If you do this, you'll require an extra 10 regret points to respec into warden.
This is what I plan on doing - I will level as a deadeye and at the end of the campaign I'll do a few desecrated chambers runs while switching over into static strike of gathering lightning.
I'll then continue as a gathering winds only claw build into white and yellow maps until I find an ilvl73+ prismatic tincture, an ilvl73+ rosethorn tincture, and an uber lab key.
Then I'll do uber lab (still as a deadeye), then unspec gathering winds with gold, then run normal lab and swap over into warden.
For uber lab, I would recommend adding in a vitality and/or multiple divine flasks (preferably with bleed immunity) into the build. Caution: you will need to manually dodge every one of izaro's attacks.
For this purpose, throughout the campaign I will be levelling a vitality in my offhand. To make the reservation space, when running lab you can simply disable your grace aura (you don't need evasion against izaro if you just manually dodge his stuff).
Tincture Metronome Autohotkey 1.0 Script
PgDn::
toggle:=!toggle
While toggle{
SoundPlay *-1
Sleep 10300
}
Return
After running the script, you start it by pressing the Page Down key (this is the "PgDn" at the top). You can rebind this to any other key, look up the autohotkey documentation to find the notation of whatever key you want to set it to.
The number after "Sleep" is how many milliseconds to wait after each time the sound plays. Don't set this to the exact time it takes for a tincture to finish and come off cooldown, add an extra 500 to 1000 milliseconds to account for human error.
"SoundPlay *-1" is the line that causes the sound to play. "*-1" corresponds to a default beep. Change this line if you want to make it play a different sound or do a different action.
See the documentation for SoundPlay here:
https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v1/lib/SoundPlay.htm
Alternate Script for Autohotkey 2.0 (Windows only)
PgDn::{
Static Toggle := false ; declares the toogle
Toggle := !Toggle ; flip the toogle
If Toggle{
SetTimer(macro, 10300)
SoundPlay, %A_WinDir%\Media\chimes.wav
}
Else{
SetTimer(macro, 0)
}
}
macro(){ ; this portion declares the function that you be called by the toogle
SoundPlay, %A_WinDir%\Media\chimes.wav
}
This script plays an actual .wav file located in your default windows directory. If you want to see this directory, if you open file explorer you should be able to enter the path C:\Windows\Media
These sound files exist on every default windows installation, and provide a selection of different sounds to choose from. For example, you could change it to %A_WinDir%\Media\Windows Ding.wav or %A_WinDir%\Media\Windows Critial Stop.wav.
The world is your oyster. You could also change the file path to any arbitary audio file on your computer if you had a specific custom sound in mind.