I haven't played in a few leagues, but have always had a soft spot for Hiero/mana builds. When the new Shock effect skills came out, I was curious as to whether we could take advantage of the lightning mastery that lets us use increases and reductions to mana at 30% of their effect to shock effect.

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The example is using Shock Nova with *mid* endgame build. The necessary uniques: Prism Guardian, Skyforth, Ivory Tower, and either Thunderfist OR Painseeker, and a Militant Faith that has the mod '3% increased effect of non-damaging ailments per 10 devotion). Nice to Have's include Astral Projector and Atziri's Foible.

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POB: https://pastebin.com/EDRaTbLF

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The point of this was to show that between mana scaling, militant faith, the tree, and one medium cluster, we can easily overcap shock effect on an Uber Boss. POB doesn't have Shock Nova's 10% increased maximum effect of shock, but we're sitting over 100% with this POB, which means we will easily hit the 75% cap with a hit of about 45k. This is also a noncrit build that does rely on power-charge scaling with Ele overload, allowing us to safely spec into the 'non-crits are lucky' lightning mastery as well as use controlled destruction on our 6-link - we actually don't ever want to crit on our main 6l!

I haven't res or attribute capped the character, but we have enough gear slots to make it happen. Right now we are using a jewel slot to simulate Overcharge Support, but if that's an abyssal slot thats likely more mana/ES, a resistance mod, and a 15% lightning ailment slot. In fact, if I had that slot back, I'd drop the Divine Judgment area and get 5 points back - probably throwing them into the jewel slot near there and another max power charge (and hope for another minimum power charge somewhere else, at which point Power-Charge on Crit starts to outperform Inspiration on Shock Nova), and that lets us get basically any Watcher's Eye- we are running Wrath, Zealotry, Purity of Elements, and Clarity. We'll find something good.

Alternatively, assuming our gear is good enough, we can get Willclash with the appropriate helmet enchant (we don't really need the helm with RMR, its only about 300 mana), spec more into power charges and get up to 73% spell block with the Safeguard Wheel. That ends up being huge for our survivability because, with the mastery, we get 50 energy shield and 20 mana every time we block.

We have a couple of other pretty easy ways to scale the build from here with better gear. Anomalous Shock Nova with an Enhance 4, Lightning Penetration, Arcane Surge gets us just over (78%) the Uber Threshold for the full shock and allows us to drop overcharge support and ideally allow our Nova to be a bit better at clearing trash.

Anyway - this is probably not viable given the low ES (5.5k) and unreserved mana (3.7k), but was hoping between Sigil of Power, Arcane Guard, and the 4 min endurance charges we'd squeeze enough survivability out. One last survivability tip I wouldn't mind using is getting a Medium Cluster with Overshock and Chilling Presence, since we've scaled the Chill up to a pretty respectable amount. But again, this was mostly done to showcase that Shock Nova could be used to reliably generate full strength shocks on even the tankiest endgame bosses without stuff that was too unachievable.