Hello, here's a little showcase of my budget league starter, a Spark Inquisitor involving triple stat stacking.

poe.ninja link : https://poe.ninja/builds/affliction/character/Noisnamalark/Squalaspark (may not be completely up to date)

pobb.in link : https://pobb.in/b7Rrle5O6dgB

Spark has that reputation of a skill that doesn't function well unless you've got an insane amount of currency to spend on it. And while it's true that it can scale very high with mirror tier gear, I also wanted to show you can make it work on a very affordable budget, and it's not even a glass canon build.

The character is completely built around the Widowhail + Saemus' Gift synergy. It grants a large amount of defensive stats, lots of cast speed, some %increased damage scaling, and most importantly, a nice bunch of projectile speed. It's actually the reason we're going for Spark as a main skill in the first place.

As I was theorycrafting the character as a typical Inquisitor stacking both strength and intelligence, I realized that I was getting a bunch of dexterity for free, most notably from Astramentis, Saemus' Gift and Cyclopean Coil, and that I was already pathing near Magebane for duration nodes. With only a tiny bit of extra investment in dexterity, it makes for a very large amount of spell suppress, and it also lets us use Fractal Thoughts, an other powerful (and cheap!) unique item for stat stacking.

The rest of the character kinda builts itself, EB + MoM + Inquisitor's regen is great for life pool + recovery and grants an extra Aura with Divine Blessing, Evasion works well with spell suppress and the intel stacking Eva/ES mastery, instant leech with a fast hiting skill is broken, I had an extra 6L so I went for a double unleash setup but it's not mandatory.

Most of the uniques are affordable if you're not going for perfect rolls, my rare items aren't even that good but the character's still decent enough for end game content. I could get extra stat lines if my res rolls were better overall, but we're only a few days into the league so the gear is a bit scuffed. Efficient Training is good to easily fix stats but could be replaced with a much better jewel. I also planned to use Split Personnality jewels in the Witch/Shadow area but the build is short on passives and there's nothing I would remove from the current tree. I'll get the Shadow jewel socket + an extra frenzy charge over the next few levels.

Leveling is easy enough, use any skill you like until you're level 45, I did Wintertide Brand since it doesn't require EO uptime and there's some strong brand nodes near Templar start. Then, you can equip Widowhail (any roll above 200% will do) + Saemus' Gift and start using Spark. I'll describe how to confortably level the character if people are interested in it.

As a sidenote, if you like the Saemus + Widowhail idea but are not too found of Spark, just know that you could also make it work with new Penance Brand or Divine Ire. Swap the duration/projectile nodes for something else, get extra phys as lightning as a corruption on the quiver, and you're also set for a strong caster build.

That's pretty much it for the build, let me know if you have questions. I'm also open to suggestions on how to improve it, I've only been playing it for a few days so I may have missed some strong synergies. I'm not expecting it to scale into dozens of millions of DPS, you'll have to actually buy expensive items for that. I just wanted a confortable caster for league start, and I think it does the job pretty well.

Thanks for reading !