PoB

poe.ninja profile - For some reason, the cluster notables are not allocated correctly, and my max chaos res is 84% when it should be 88%. Classic poe.ninja things

100% Delirium Showcase - Atlas tree in description of video

Budget: ~650-750 divs as of 1/14/2024 (inflation is a hell of a drug)

DPS: ~152M DPS, ~126M DPS without Totem

Tankiness: Yes

Wanted to share my journey for one of the strangest and strongest builds I've ever put together - my Frenzy/Endurance charge stacking Splitting Steel Slayer with poison support. I solo leveled to 100 doing 80% deli/breach farming, which is a testament to its tankiness (and also a testament to me crashing too much during 5ways :( ). I hope these build interactions spark some ideas of your own!

Why include Poison on a cold-based build?

The idea started around the one-of-a-kind Forbidden Shako I picked up, which supports socketed gems with level 34 Ice Bite and level 3 Vile Toxins. Vile Toxins provides %more damage with hits against enemies with poison stacks, which didn't seem synergistic with flat cold damage from Ice Bite/other sources. However, I came up with an idea to enable this support... and then some!

• Gloves - Snakebite: Since we have 10 Frenzy charges, these gloves give a TON of increased Attack Speed and accuracy rating while being common enough to get strong vaal implicits (mainly +1 Frenzy Charge). However, the important line is 'Attacks have 60% chance to Poison while at Maximum Frenzy Charges'. This enables us to poison a majority of the time with our attacks.
• Boots - Ralakesh's Impatience: These boots make it so we always have maximum Power, Frenzy, and Endurance charges. Slayer's Masterful Form notable gives us +1 Frenzy Charge and sets our max Endurance charges to our max Frenzy Charges. This means we have 100% uptime on 3 power/10 frenzy/10 endurance charges, which enables the use of powerful 'per X charge' mods. These boots are also important to enable Snakebite's poison on hit as well.
• Amulet - Tainted Pact: Tainted Pact is one of my favorite items to build around. Alongside The Golden Rule unique jewel that reflects poisons we inflict on ourselves, Tainted Pact makes it so Chaos damage over time heals us instead of hurts us while leeching (Slayer overleech is important here). With dozens of poisons on us, we regen back to full health nearly every server tick (0.033 seconds), which is unparalleled protection against small hits.
• Body Armour - Incandescent Heart: The hardest part was figuring out how to poison with cold damage. Cold damage can poison with the use of Tinctures, Volkuur's Guidance gloves, or a Pneumatic dagger, but all of those options come with huge opportunity costs. I decided to go with Incandescent Heart to give a chunk of elemental damage as added Chaos Damage, which is more than enough poison DoT to give giga regen to ourselves. This body armour also provides a ton of defensive power as well, which we'll talk about next...

Note that the Forbidden Shako Vile Toxins mod is not necessary at all. It was more inspiration than anything, and was only 75divs vs. other 'useable' low level supports which are 300div+.

Now that we're near invulnerable against small hits, how do we mitigate larger ones?

1. Divine Flesh + Incandescent Heart + 88% max Chaos Resistance allows us to take 75% of elemental hits at 88% max res. We also get the added benefit of transferring 50% of elemental damage over time to chaos, which heals us while leeching due to Tainted Pact. Things like Shaper Beams are laughed off!
2. 10 Endurance Charges + 6% Phys Damage Reduction on shield + 59K armour (with Iron Reflexes + %inc evasion/armour per Frenzy/Endurance charge from Arm/Eva Mastery) provides good protection against physical hits. Since our life regen is absolutely insane with Tainted Pact and overleech, we really don't care about evading/blocking hits.
3. Molten Shell + Increased Duration on left click. Good to have Vaal version emergency button in case of uber boss abilities you fail to avoid.
4. 56% reduced extra damage taken from crits from Watcher's Eye - may try to find an Incandescent Heart with an extra 50% reduction vaal implicit at some point.
5. 100% Spell Suppression through 9 tree nodes + Mageblood quartz flask - huge against stuff like uber bosses and ultimatum mods (holy shit some of those level IV mods are overtuned!). I chose Suppression over going to the left side of the tree for '10% of armour applied to chaos damage taken from hits' from Armour/ES mastery. Would be nice to put in the build, but the tree is already stretched so thin.
6. Elemental Ailment immunity through Stormshroud + Shock Avoidance mod on Mageblood flask.
7. Forbidden Flame/Flesh allocating Fortitude from Champ for 100% Fortification uptime. These are important to use for Splitting Steel since it is not a melee skill, which means we can't use 'Melee Skills Fortify on hit' mods.

Why Splitting Steel? And where does your damage come from?

While there are a few viable options for skills to slot into this archetype (shoutout to Vaal Reave which is an excellent runner-up), Splitting Steel does so many things for this build:

1. EXCELLENT clear with 3 pierce, 150% inc AoE from charms/tree, Herald of Ice explosions (with the inc AoE, *chef's kiss*), and 10 returning projectiles through Sniper's mark + tree node.
2. Splitting Steel hits MANY times per second, giving us high uptime on self-poisons for Tainted Pact.
3. Nimis returning projectiles overlap on single target, giving us huge shotgun potential and a very high effectiveness of added damage. Forbidden Shako Ice Bite + Paradoxica give the majority of flat damage we need. Shotguns are made much more consistent with the increased AoE we're getting from Endurance charges + charms. We do lose out on another Frenzy charge through a Kalandra's Touch, but the shotgun potential outweighs the benefits by a mile.
4. The Splitting Steel gem also gives a non-trivial amount of flat phys damage, which we can use to increase poison DoT for regen and mana leech from Tainted Pact. We also don't care about phys reflect maps due to Slayer ascendancy.
5. Frostblink with Frostbite + Awakened Hextouch to apply curse, Bonechill + Increased Duration for ~5 seconds of chilled ground for damage amplification. AoE nodes help with chilled ground coverage.
6. The Writhing Jar giving us important buffs: Killing something recently (Slayer's Bane of Legends gives 10% more damage if killed recently), Shattering something recently (ring mod), and Petrified Blood + 'Gain Adrenaline for 4 Seconds When You Reach Low Life' for big burst windows. Can use Soul of Ryslatha if spamming Uber Bosses. Can also swap out for Progenesis for even more tankiness, but I found this to be overkill.

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I originally made this build as a Gruelling Gauntlet (13 round, can't pick downside) Ultimatum farmer, which it excels at. There are no mods that brick the build, and can comfortably shrug off anything thrown at it (except Ruin, *shakes fist*). Quickly realized that Ultimatum without the boss is the biggest bait I've ever fallen for, especially in a league where you want to juice monster drops.

I've been working on this build for weeks, and would love any feedback/ideas you may have. My IGN is iNikoMontoya_Steel if you have any questions.

Good luck on your future builds as well! Cheers!