[3.17] Min-maxed Petrified Blood Champion Spark Aurastacker - Endgame Showcase and Detailed Writeup.

POB: https://pastebin.com/dZeK1Du6

Summary of stats: Offense - 50 mill shaper spark dps with reasonable buffs (no onslaught), 55 mill with onslaught (simulacrum only), see latest edit (this changed since we posted)

Defense - 90/90/90 res, 130k armour, 110k evasion. Overleech/life sustain with petrified blood, immunity to all elemental ailments on consecrated ground, fortify, stun immune, chill/freeze.

Description

After a week of theorycrafting and item crafting, my buddy Patrick and I are proud to showcase our version of a min-maxed champion aurastacker. It has a great balance of tankiness/sustain as well as damage, as you can see in the video showcase. Our goal was to reach the top of the poe.ninja self-cast aurastacker real dps ladder (which is generally competitive) with the following three constraints: 1. The build could not be a scion (I often like to tread off the beaten track with build variants). 2. The build needs to exploit new crafting mods/mechanics introduced in the patch. 3. The build needs to be just as well-rounded in defense as offense. Unfortunately, this meant that mageblood would be required, due to its ability to offset the need for many defenses on gear.

The main purpose of this post is to go through the thought process of developing and minmaxing such a build which (in my opinion) doesn’t have much of a precedent on previous ladders (or the current one). Just to put my money where my mouth is, here is a poe.ninja list of all current self-cast aurastackers (with the definition of an aurastacker as a build which uses nebulis and converts self-cast damage to cold): https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds?item=Nebulis&sort=dps.

We are currently the only aurastacker (besides one other person who is currently trying to follow our build) on ladder with petrified blood, while all other life-based aurastackers are following Ruetoo’s build variant (which is extremely good for its price point, and way better than ours from a price efficiency perspective and mapping QOL). Nevertheless, I was primarily concerned with the absolute maximum potential of this build variant, and believe, given an extremely high budget, it is difficult to beat the all-rounded stats of our build. Note that poe.ninja does not represent any aurastacker build accurately (secrets of suffering isn’t calculated, vaal haste disables haste, petrified blood low life is sometimes disabled, etc.).

A detailed write-up of the rationale, item design decisions, and synergies can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JkCBY_NMjsVOoiyWxpS3ccsVe5S8ZX4Ux1Xv5C8UEPs/edit?usp=sharing. The second purpose of this document is to inform people who are trying to follow our build on what stats they should be worried about (and how the build plays)

Edit: Item crafting guide will be updated in post and in video showcase if there's enough interest Edit 2: POB updated (corrupted 21/20 phantasmal smite, divined perfect militant faith somehow)