Context

You might have seen the recent posts about being able to craft a weapon that makes Discharge not consume charges. It's a pretty great mechanic, but it also has a significant downside - it costs a lot. You need to craft the weapon itself, you need Ashes, you need Awakened Enhance 5, you need the helm enchant, etc. While the above offers a build that definitely has a higher ceiling than what I'm about to show, it is also at a price point that most will never be able to afford.

There is another way.

Build Idea

Instead of not consuming charges, you can go the easy route - simply gain maximum charges in the 0.264 seconds while Discharge is on cooldown. This is possible by using Aspect of the Cat with Farrul's Fur and getting reduced skill effect duration to 95% + Less Duration Support. You get 25% from tree, 60% from rings and amulet and 10% from Crucible tree. This makes you gain Cat's stealth exactly every 0.264 seconds - and thus you always have charges available for your Discharge.

Consequently, the budget to get started is merely around 1 div. I know this for a fact, because I switched to this as soon as I reached maps and cleared my Atlas using Flicker Discharge and making incremental improvements. The most expensive part is Farrul's Fur, which you don't need 6-linked - you can get it for 120c at the moment.

Offense

• 3.5M dps at current investment of around 15 div
• 1 button auto-target build - simply flicker around.
• Maximum brittle (+6 base crit) even against bosses -> easy 100% crit
• Flicker Cast on Crit applies curses automatically at full power.
• Uses Elemental Equilibrium for easy 25% exposure, applied by the Flicker before the Discharge. Make sure your Flicker does some fire damage! Also, my first build ever where the additional accuracy support gem actually really helped!
• You always have Cat's stealth when you hit with discharge, if your Flicker has higher casts per second than every 0.264s, because you attack as soon as you gain charges. Important: make sure you gain charges only every 0.264s and not faster, otherwise you will flicker before Discharge comes off cooldown!
• Reduced skill duration means you can also trigger Discharge using Lightning Warp! Also helps move around fast if you need to backtrack at some point.

Defense

• Only 3k life... but
• Pathfinder -> all flasks always up
• 2.5k life per second from permanent Eternal Life Flask
• Petrified blood + full life due to above flask
• Around 35% less elemental damage taken due to flasks
• 15-20% Sap
• 100% spell suppression
• 22k evasion + blind
• 13k armour
• 22% life and 31% mana recoup
• 100%+ reduced reflected damage taken

I have recently finally reached the point where I stopped dying to essence mobs in T16 maps (I'm fully specced in essence). Killing regular Maven was also pretty easy. I usually channel Crucible to around 85-90% -> enough to reveal the tree on a new item each map. 100% is too much at the moment.

PoB

https://pobb.in/t1N7cdu3YmwO

Disclaimer: This is the PoB of my actual character. It's far from fully optimized. Total investment so far is around 15 div.

Some planned improvements:

• get 80% reduced extra damage from crits (30% from crit mastery + 40% from curse mastery), just need 2 more levels
• Get Call to Arms on Crucible tree + Enduring cry to generate occasional Endurance charges -> apply Scorch
• Finally get 6 link Farrul's and add Culling strike to flicker. Or maybe Inspiration, because on tanky enemies I do sometimes run out of mana if they don't hit me for 4+ seconds.
• Lvl 21 gems, all relevant qualities up to 20%, etc.
• Check whether cluster jewels help... if they are affordable.
• ...
• Open to further suggestions!

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PS: decided to post this on reading this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/comments/132fgca/comment/ji5yxpx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3