Here's a showcase of a build I've been cooking for a while. The video quality will probably suck as this is a very visually intensive build that relies on CWS Bladefall + Bladeblast to deal about half of its damage. The other half is the interesting part and a unique flavor for Phrecia league: Ancestral Commander's Deathrattle.

Links

• PoB guide with multiple budget options and upgrade paths: https://pobb.in/-Ne5J9tClWtq

How good is the build?

The showcase might not seem that impressive but the build is handling 127% increased explicit effect maps with 13 modifiers (8-mods + 5 scarabs). It's a wonderful build for AFK simulacrum and I've done over 30 sims so far.

That said, Ubers and even T17 bosses are not really an option, since this build has some serious single-target problems and is not exactly immortal. If you want to jump ship, consider having a dedicated bosser build first.

How does it work?

This character is a very special flavor of autobomber that uses the Ancestral Commander Ascendancy "Deathrattle" to explode enemy corpses as physical damage on command whenever we warcry. Interestingly, this modifier already exists in the unique helmet "Kaom's Command" and we can stack both effects to deal up to 22% of a corpse life as physical damage when we warcry.

But first, we need to add a source of corpses that does not require us to kill anything. Desecrate and Unearth each provide a separate pool of 10 corpses, for a total of 20 corpses, with downside that Unearth requires the build to stack a significant amount of gem levels. This makes the build lean more heavily towards a "caster".

It's also the reason why the build opts into a CWS setup with bladefall + bladeblast to begin with. Unearth needs gem levels, but it does not require a significant amount of links to work properly. This leaves us an entire 6-link setup for a primary skill. Since the theme of the build is "autobomber", the choice is made in favor of a cast-when-stun setup.

From there, we need some warcries to actually explode some corpses. General's Cry has the smallest cooldown (3s) and can be automated using Autoexert without needing to be linked to any specific attack skill. Ancestral Commander also provides a hefty reduction to the warcry cooldown and it's trivial for a marauder to pick up the nodes leading to Deep Breaths so that General's Cry activates every 0.92s.

Now we could attempt to lower the cooldown of General's Cry further, but this would be extremely expensive as the only other significant source of warcry CDR comes from tattoos. It would take upwards of 40 tattoos to lower the cooldown by half (0.46s) and trying to lower the cooldown any further would be virtually impossible.

To keep things simple, we opt to keep the cooldown at the base of 0.92s (roughly 1 per second), and instead focus all our available resources (read: tattoos) into scaling the damage of the hit.

To make the scaling possible, we make use of Supreme Ostentation (Elegant Hubris) to ignore attribute requirements in the build. We use this opportunity to tattoo "increased physical damage" on strength nodes, and then path around the tree to grab generic sources of increased damage, plus a few large clusters. All-in-all we manage to stack around ~500% increased damage. This makes our 22% corpse life explosion deal 5x times more damage, or 110% corpse life.

We then multiply this damage by stacking sources of "Physical damage as extra chaos damage" from Ming's Heart with chaos quality and the runic enchant that grants unholy might on kill for a total of 102% phys as extra chaos. (110% corpse life * 2x = 220% corpse life)

And finally we make all our physical and chaos damage apply poison through Cospri's Will making our build deal an additional ~300% of the hit damage as poison damage over 2 seconds. (220% corpse life * 3x = 660% corpse life)

This results in a hit + poison build that can trivially kill any normal (non-magic, non-rare, non-unique) monster on the map.

What's the budget?

The cheapest version I'd recommend would be the Broken Faith version, which roughly requires about 30 divines worth of crafted recombinator gear (+2 wand, +2 amulet, +3 gloves). It's good enough to start doing AFK simulacrum, although waves 14 and 15 may end up rolling mods that are too hard for the build to finish. The Svalinn and Shaper shield version are roughly equivalent to each other, but slapping a Svalinn is easier than crafting a shaper shield like the one I'm using.

Mageblood mostly gives quality of life, especially with a permanent quicksilver flask. For a build that primarily walks where it needs to be, perma-quicksilver ends up feeling really good.