Mid-budget Kinetic Blast Juggernaut, feat. Uber Catarina and a short tech demo

I am defining "mid-budget" as: pretty much all of my gear is 10-25 divines on the current market, but I have no super-expensive gear like Mageblood, Nimis, or Original Sin. If you can save up for a Replica Alberons (currently 15div) you can run this build.

Ziggurat gameplay demo, fairly easy mods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SqJU4cD3Ac

PoB: https://pobb.in/AAeQYCbrSiIo (note the build does not actually use Withering Step, PoB just doesn't recognize that I can generate wither stacks with The Balance of Terror)

Build advantages:

• Good map mod flexibility. Reflect, no-regen and reduced recovery rate are all very doable. It's tanky enough to run a few monster damage mods without too many problems, though I avoid particularly synergistic monster damage mods. Many monster durability mods are no big deal for this build, including monster life to ES
• Decent gear flexibility. Basically however you can get more strength after your resists are covered.
• Can boss and has decent clear speed
• I just love the "cluster bomb" feeling of KB. It's a lot of fun to make many many splosions
• Decent durability with ~7k life, 75% attack block, acceptable armour rating, 77% max res, mostly immune to crits

Disadvantages:

• Unless you're a wiz at early-league currency farming I would not recommend this as a league starter. If you *are* a wiz at early-league currency farming you probably can get a Mageblood pretty easily and run stronger versions of this build.
• Doesn't run so fast. The clear speed is ultimately limited by move speed. Would probably work well-enough with a Headhunter, but Flicker is probably superior for that playstyle
• Definitely not an immortal build. It leans a lot on Progenesis to prevent random one-shots as it has no spell suppression, and since it has no spell block it can be vulnerable big mobs of spellcasting monsters.

General build strat is to triple-dip on strength with Alberons providing flat damage from strength, Kinetic Blast + Iron Will providing increased scaling to that flat damage, and the Juggernaut Undeniable Ascendancy passive providing attack speed scaling.

The Iron Will keystone provides 70% of this build's damage because strength scales 1% melee phys damage for every 5 points, Iron Will lets this bonus also apply to Spell damage, and Kinetic Blast has the property built into the gem that increases and reductions to Spell damage also apply to KB at 200% of their value.

The build starts in the Marauder area, and stretches over into the Ranger area to get a very long path to maximize the strength and accuracy bonuses from two Split Personality jewels.

It uses the Precise Technique notable to be able to ignore crit stats entirely. Building crit would probably be overall more damage with maxed out gear, but the goal of this build was to be less expensive. IMO I would probably need to build off a mageblood to get the affix space for crit stats (if someone wants to prove me wrong I'd be happy to see though!)

Gear:

Replica Alberons: this is the star of the show. It allows the strength stacking to generate a fuck load of base damage.

Wand: the actual important stats here are chaos pen, attack speed, spell damage. The flat chaos hardly does anything because Alberons creates so much flat damage.

Iron Fortress: provides a huge DPS boost with a large flat strength modifier as well as increasing the "increased" damage boost from strength that gets converted into spell damage * 200% -> KB damage. This also provides basically all of the attack block for the build, so it's a great defense boost as well.

Rando rares: strength and resistances. The reduced extra crit damage taken mod on the shield is important for durability. Other than the increased reservation efficiency none of the eldritch implicits are super vital to the functionality of the build, they can be customzized to your preference. The rage generation on the gloves can build up a decent amount in sustained fights for significant damage though.

Jewels:

The Balance of Terror: this build generates a *lot* of hits very fast, so you will stack up wither very fast with this jewel. It does require manually casting Despair, which can be tricky in very tough fights where you have to keep leech damage up to survive

Lethal Pride: gets me a couple of 5% increased strength on notables I was already likely to take, as well as a 5% double damage notable. I bet I could find a better one if I knew how to search for these though

Skills:

Kinetic Blast - Awakened Void Manip - Barrage support - Sacred Wisps - Awakened Fork - Volatility

pretty straight forward main links. No Returning Projectiles because it is extremely anti-synergistic with Point Blank Shot.

Haste - Enlighten - Determination

Haste is generally *not* a great way to use 50% reservation, however Replica Alberons makes it so most other offensive auras are completely pointless, Zealotry is "more" spell damage so it doesn't scale KB. I really like the movement speed and the *bit* of extra DPS from Haste, so it's good enough. You can also run Purity of Elements if you want easier gearing and to ignore elemental ailments. I run white sockets in my shield so I can swap them out.

Tornado - Spellslinger

This increases damage taken by monsters close by very significantly. It's hard to quantify how much, but the KB projectile can collide with and spawn explosions off the Tornado.

Tech demo: https://youtu.be/kzSQXE6jdKc

Despair - faster casting

manually casting despair triggers extremely fast wither stack generation due The Balance of Terror and the sheer number of hits this build generates rapidly due to KB and the Tornado tech demonstrated above

Sniper's Mark - Mark on Hit - LIfetap

I don't have quite enough mana sustain to run my mark on mana, but lifetap is a useful buff for my life flask anyways. Sniper's Mark is the best mark for this build for single target and clear

Molten Shell - Cast When Damage Taken

Since this build is more vulnerable to getting chunked down than one-shot, I like CWDT for my Guard skill. Molten Shell absorbs the most damage when you have decent armor, so it's my choice

Shield Charge - Faster Attacks - Dash

Shield Charge and Faster Attacks is the main mobility skill, Dash is a backup for when you need to teleport past an obstacle

That's basically it. This was my second build this league and I've been enjoying it quite a bit.

The starter build I ran this league was a scuffed completely home-grown Artillery Ballista Deadeye that could farm T16s and kinda sorta do T17s if I didn't run out of portals. I'm also sure my farming strategy sucks ass so I feel like most players with basic farming strategies could build this KB Juggernaut without too much trouble.