A few days ago some friends convinced me to try out Impending Doom with hit/crit & reduced duration stacking as an alternative to the current popular method of playing it. I'd run into a few people who swore by it and promised me it was better than the curse stripping approach Paak seems to have popularized. I made this character mostly for science and to sate curiosity because in my head I was sure reduced duration stacking could be good but I wanted to see for myself.

V1/V2

I sunk 330D~ into it between all the iterations before getting it to work (PoB/Gameplay) and I ended up with a character that could blast maps without any troubles. The premise of this character was to get 99% reduced curse duration on a low level temp chains to fix curse duration to 2 server ticks (66ms) and then essentially have a cast speed slow enough to apply and detonate 3 curses each time while taking into consideration cooldown/charges of ID.

Seeking to improve the build & optimise cast speed I resorted to poison/hit rate testing in PVP and discovered that I was only getting one or two instances of damage per cast, and spamming curse with no downtime on a target actually made it possible to deal no damage at all, and this all occurs for different reasons:

1. Using low level temp chains results in lower base radius, having to annoint window of opportunity results in losing Skittering Runes AoE. This produces a perfect deadzone when casting on a small target in which only the middle of the 5 temp chains curses actually applies to the enemy, resulting in 1 proc of damage per cast and losing MASSIVE amounts of DPS (less than 4 instances of damage per second vs 7.5 hits on paper)
2. Getting too many overlaps seems to cause curses to reapply too fast for each application to wear off, spamming temp chains at high cast speed or on an overlap spot results in a semi delayed cascade of woke cascades which leads to the enemy getting recursed at least every other frame/server tick leading to curses never having a chance to expire and dealing no damage

So for the reasons laid out above (or maybe for a 3rd reason I haven't figured out yet), best case scenario with my set up was getting two overlaps but casting slow enough to ensure im never reapplying too fast. This MIGHT have been fixable by swapping woke cascade to regular cascade or ditching cascade altogether, however our AoE was already low and this would defeat the purpose of using Doom Blast as a clear speed tool, so I didn't bother testing it.

After deciding I was unable to salvage the potential for 3 procs of damage per cast consistently, I opened PoE Ninja and found a few other people doing reduced duration stacking with various takes. I tested a few of them just to be sure and also found I was unable to hit 3 procs of Doom on a single target using other people's approach to the concept.

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V3

Following all this, I decided for to do a like for like transfer from my Reduced duration stacking set up to a curse stripping approach. This involved:

• Replacing Ass Mark with a non-offensive curse
• Replacing WoO annoint with Skittering Runes for AoE
• Replacing low level anom temp chains with a higher level one (for AoE)
• Adding woke cascade into Vixens and ditching Hexbloom

Despite reducing my PoB damage, the character seemed to have more than doubled its single target DPS. In fact, it beat Uber Exarch on my first try which is good considering it used to die to 60% deli juiced map bosses sometimes on its old DPS.

Swapping to Curse Stripping wasn't ONLY an immediate DPS increase though, it opened up the ability to scale CDR to hit the same breakpoints as COC (4 & 3 server ticks), and with Anom Temp Chains and Elevated Boots it's even possible to hit 52% CDR without giving up the belt slot (mageblood) which means I can still easily push another 33% more damage into the build, let alone the 4~ power charges I'm still yet to attain.

Current PoB after Swapping

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Conclusions:

• Curse Stripping is vastly better than reduced duration stacking due to requiring less investment for a superior hit rate (At least based on our current level of information)
• Reduced Duration stacking seems to have mechanical/functionality issues that can't be resolved by making any reasonable sacrifices
• Poison is overall better than hit/crit in terms of value (defense/damage/speed/budget), and the DoT nature of the skill can result in staggered explosions which are super useful for cleaning areas full of eldritch/beyond/harby mobs which load in on a delay
• Advantages of hit/crit are obscenely high overkill damage (BIG HoA explosions) and immediate damage rather than relying on DoTs/Ramp
• There was way more to test, but I ran out of money in the process of trying everything out.
• Paak's take is PROBABLY going to be proven correct in the long term more or less