I've been fascinated by the Black Zenith gloves for a while, since they're a wonderful puzzle piece; you can get huge damage but in return you have to solve this really irritating cooldown puzzle. We've already had one build that solves this with Flamewood totems, and while I'm not going to claim this build idea is as good as that, it's certainly another approach.

(tl:dr; fury valve + sniper's + return makes blazing salvo shotgun so hard it spawns a bunch of phantasms even on single targets, and phantasms in Black Zenith gloves get 150% more hit damage, so they're just really good, but last only 6 seconds. very rough pob: https://pobb.in/n0vWHE8tAcAL)

So what happens if you put minions in Black Zenith gloves? For the most part, nothing, since they don't have both Spell and Projectile tags. However, there's one minion that has some sort of wacky ‘tag inheritance’ game going on, and that's phantasms. If you support a gem that's tagged with both Spell and Projectile (not two gems separately with one each, I tried that), you get phantasms that count for the purposes of Black Zenith. This means they shoot 4 extra projectiles that have 150% more damage, and they do it without a 4 second cooldown. This sounds like a thing that builds are made of; supercharged phantasms! (Unfortunately they also only last 20% as long as regular phantasms… but we try to fix this later, kinda.)

Sweet! But… how do you get that many phantasms out? Max level support means you can have 11 of them. For clearing it's not really an issue, but if we want to kill a boss… it'll be painful to shoot a projectile skill at a boss every 4 seconds and only 20% of those hits actually make a phantasm. What we need is a skill that hits really really often in a short time.

For this, I present Blazing Salvo with Fury Valve, Sniper's Mark and return tech. You get +7 projectiles from lvl21 Salvo, +5 from lvl21 Sniper's Mark splits, +2 from Fury Valve, so that's 17 plus one original, 18, and if they return, 36. When you cast Salvo with Fury Valve, you fire a lone projectile that (hopefully) hits the target and splits off, but in this case the splits land really close by, and all their areas overlap and hit the target. Then, they return and hit the single target again, so you get double the hits. 36 * 20% chance to summon a phantasm is 7.2 phantasms summoned on average. If we add GMP/Greater Volley, you get +8 for 44 total hits, or 8.8 ‘expected phantasms per cast’. You can get lucky and get all 11 in one trap, or unlucky and get like 5 only.

Ok, but you still have to fire the dang skill on a 4 second cooldown, and cooldown reduction tech is not exactly abundant. But there's a delivery system that can help; traps! Mines have no cooldown reduction, annoyingly, Spell Totem support gets shafted with the 4sec cooldown from the gloves, and Arcanist Brands share the Salvo cooldown amongst themselves, so they're all a bust. But traps; I can get +1 cooldown use from the tree as well as 20% cooldown reduction, which makes this actually tolerable.

That's the core of the idea here. The rest is just some interesting choices; return support vs Nimis is one. Nimis is great, but the random projectile direction really can screw over traps, leading to them firing a Salvo that just does nothing. Returning support fixes this, especially since we don't really care about Salvo damage. So that's 3 gems I need; Trap, Salvo and Return support. What goes in socket 4 is interesting; Greater Volley gives us more projectiles, and the phantasms inherit the volley behaviour which looks cool as hell. Increased Duration would help make the phantasms last longer. GMP is just more projectiles for both increased phantasm spawn rate and their own projectile attacks. Second Wind lets us have 3 cooldown stored uses. Advanced Traps knocks the cooldown down by a rather large chunk. The right choice to me at this point is unknown.

I don't have a ‘finished’ build, but I have a rough prototype here: https://pobb.in/n0vWHE8tAcAL . It is very rough, I took an existing Soulwrest phantasm build and modified it to do this crazy thing instead. 11 phantasms there have ~2mill dps, which is not nothing, but I'd want to know I could do a lot more. The current scaling can be summarised as ‘lots of aura effect’, since we have no room for direct supports in the gem links.

There are still problems; is there a less clunky solution than having to throw traps with a multi second cooldown? Can we make duration better? If I wasn't a necromancer the phantasm duration is about 2 seconds; the current prototype has 6.5s due to Necromancer nodes. The skill duration nodes and mastery would help but they're very out of the way. Saboteur would be great for cooldown (and possibly some triggerbot shenanigans) but it loses the 50% minion duration that Necromancer gets, which is really really bad.

So yeah, my favourite unique Fury Valve came out of left field to help with a completely unrelated problem. And if anyone's got any ideas, please let me know; this would be a hilarious build if it actually worked properly.

One last thing I was unsure about; the ways of Summon Phantasm support are mysterious, and since the phantasms inherit Spell and Projectile tags from Blazing Salvo, does it also inherit Trap tag from the trap support? I have no way of knowing, but it would be an interesting thing to be able to invest in trap damage to boost their dps. I doubt this works, but weirder things have happened.

I occasionally stream wacky things like this over on twitch.tv/kapectas as well.