Intro

A couple of weeks ago when I saw the video about using curse recovery mastery (recover 1% of life and mana when cursing a non-cursed enemy) with replica doedre's damning to be able to recover 1% of life and mana (x amount curses you are applying) with each hit, I wanted to make Storm Brand Indigon build with it. I have now killed all the ubers a handfull of times and I think I have gotten most of the build in to good shape, but I believe there is still a lot of room for improvement and I would like to discuss about ways to improve the build in this thread.

The build

https://pobb.in/XmU47x1XlTV7

The core of the build is Indigon with curse mastery Recover 1% of Mana when you Curse a Non-Cursed Enemy - Recover 1% of Life when you Curse a Non-Cursed Enemy. The Idea is to apply multiple curses with each hit to recover enough mana so that we can keep the Indigon stacks as high as possible. I chose Storm Brand as a skill because with one cast the brand can hit like 40 times over it's lifetime (against one enemy), and with my current setup it's 8,2 times per second which leads to 8% life and mana recovered per second per brand per curse. I currently have 4 curses on hit and we can keep two brands on boss, which gives us 8,2 hits/s * 4 curses * 2 brands = 66% of life and mana recovered each second against one mob. For my setup this comes to about 2,8k mana and 2,6k life recovered per sec.

Because our curse limit is 0 we can't rely on curses to give us ele pen, I thought it is easiest to go Inquisitor and ignore all the elemental penetration doodahs with Inevitable Judgement which makes our crits ignore enemy's elemental resistances. I thought about Hierophant from mana stacking perspective, but I just don't think there is enough value there.

The toon was originally manabond hiero, and I thought similar int/strength stacking action could be utilized here. I am currently at 1077 int and 733 strength and I get quite good amount of life, mana, ES and crit from this. I have 4,2k unreserved life, 4,5k ES and 4,1K mana.

"Problems"

The areas I would like to make better are survivability and clear speed. We have damage more than enough, and I am willing to sacrifice some of it for better QoL.

On paper I have 54k effective hit pool with MoM, or 42k without MoM. I have 66% of life and mana recovered per sec against single monster. But for some reason the build doesn't feel that tanky. It might be because the recovery is dependent on my brands hitting something, and there is a lot of situations where my brands are not hitting anything but damage is coming in. This combined with no mitigating mechanics like evasion or armor sometimes chips away the hit pool quickly. This is especially deadly if I have ramped the Indigon up to high mana cost and left to low mana without brands hitting anything, as now I am left waiting for the Indigon mana cost to ramp down so I can cast Storm Brand and get the life and mana recovery running again.

My feeling is that I would either need high mitigation, or some damage recovery mechanic. I tried switching Wrath to Determination with granite flask and Divine shield but it didn't feel like fixing the issue that well. Recoup seems to be tied to life, so its value is a bit diminished as half of my hit pool is in ES. Have not tested it. Progenesis would likely help as it gives more leeway for situations where brands are not hitting anything at that instant but have not been able to test it out yet.

The other "problem" is clear speed. I mean it is by no means bad, but I would like for it to be better. I think the problem comes from Storm Brand as a skill, as one brand can only kill a couple of mobs with each brand activation. I have taken the mastery Brands Attach to a new Enemy each time they Activate, no more than once every 0.3 seconds and invested a bit to brand attachment range, which helped a ton, but still things could be better. It might also be that I was just spoiled by my previous TS deadeye build.

Discussion

Here are couple of ideas I have considered that could be pursued on top of the ones I already mentioned before (mitigation mechanics, recoup, Progenesis).

• I have currently sockets to spare, as my Annihilating light is currently empty. This could be used for second six-linked spell or other supporting skills.
• I am also open to changing Storm Brand to some other skill if it can do decent damage, clear well and utilize the Indigon and curse recovery mastery.
• Maybe Storm Brand could be just a tool for recovery mastery to proc by using Storm Brand - Swiftbrand - Faster Casting. Though this might get clunky to keep up with the increased mana cost from Indigon and trying to cast the main skill also.
• Is the Int / Str stacking worth it, or would there be better alternatives?

Any thoughts? No need to restraint the ideas to things I have already thought of.