Another league, another homebrew inquis build. I know everyone's seen enough impending doom builds to be sick of it, I promise this has some pretty unique touches compared to most as well as some decent science on the skill in general.

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TLDR: with a radius of 40 (maybe as low as 38, cannot easily test) curses triple overlap under the cursor using normal cascade, making woke unnecessary. Echoforge adds as much damage as a +5 staff would except a normal +5 doesn't work for ID since it is a support. A 2 mod balance of terror lets you keep up both easily if you run the 2nd curse as a 1 link you can manual cast, and running 2 curses in vixens with cascade and arcane surge is much better imo than forcing 3 curses and anointing whispers of doom.

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This isn't designed to be a crazy high end setup pushing the limits of the game, it's a vessel to use echoforge in a reasonable build that just happened to come out insanely cheap and efficient. Mathil beat me to the punch using the battlemage helm, but I've been cooking this up for a while and I've gotta say it works much better than I thought relative to what I put in. So far I have killed uber shaper with this, the defenses are just not enough for most ubers though (bullet hell and slam are guaranteed oneshots, the latter through molten shell too). I think I can beat uber uber elder and maybe uber exarch, eater and cortex should be damn near impossible though and maven and sirus I would need more dps to avoid stacking degens.

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https://pobb.in/CLaUb4z46YDi - The notes are relevant, I promise I am not trying to cheat the configs with that absurd cast speed (credit to fyrebat, I got that solution from his vid), we just need PoB to understand that we are hitting as fast as the cooldown will allow us to. Overkill cast speed stops it from messing up by rounding server ticks, although the base cd is still showing as slightly too long which deflates dps a little.

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Specs - determ, grace, corrupted soul + pious path + petrified blood combo, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15M dps. No block / suppress / maxres, and too many uniques to see an avenue to adding lots of them without becoming a mageblood build. Comfy and fast mapping, not super tanky bossing but capable enough for the easy ubers.

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Budget: I paid 6 div, it may be closer to 10 if you buy instead of crafting

- 2 div Balance of terror with cdr and wither

-1 div astra with charisma

- I paid <100c for this echoforge, I see the price is shooting back up for good life rolls but those that were posted yesterday are 1-2 div so I would try and find one in that area, it's still not used in a single REAL build on ninja.

-1div boots, try for higher chaos res

-100c to a div each for belt and rings, rings just need life + resists + reduced mana cost craft. Helm I crafted with essence, the life regen suffix is really nice but flat regen would work too.

-1 div watcher's eye

-Super cheap skin of the lords, 2g4b is much more expensive but *we can use whichever curse we want as our main skill as long as we manually cast the other once every 10s*.

-50c chaos cluster, the 25% inc effect was a lucky ex slam. You just need any node that pushes unholy grace to the side so you do not need to fill out the whole cluster. You could also just not run the cluster at all, take one cast speed node under defiled forces if you need it, but I found my %inc damage was too low without a cluster.

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Less Budget, but still not crazy: https://pobb.in/z_I8kt4mNxhi

Costs an extra 20-30 div to get a +2 aoe 78 res loreweave and craft a cdr belt, the helm is a STRUGGLE to find so use anything with cdr implicit and ideally chaos res unless belt has it. a CDR eber's unification was up for 3d and is the best dps option you could ask for, but I passed on it for not having other relevant stats.

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Why Echoforge + Impending Doom?

ID is a support gem, so it does not gain levels from the vast majority of sources (basically just dialla's, skin of the lords, and staves / cane of kulemak). Since levels add flat damage, that makes other sources of added flat disporportionately stronger on ID than they would be on a different skill pumped to level 30. Echoforge winds up being about 5 synthetic levels to ID with this setup, not counting its significant life and chaos shocks. Given how few chaos hit spells or sword attacks there are, I think this is by far the best use of the sword unless you're able to fully chaos convert ie original sin.

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What about awakened spell cascade?

Don't need it. Go into a map, isolate one enemy, and allocate ancestral bond. Press C to open your character panel and look at your ID cooldown charges. If your cast speed is reasonable, you should never see it hit 3 while you are casting continuously. With much higher CDR you DO need woke cascade to make it work, but ralakesh + magnate feels incredibly strong and difficult to cut for rares with cdr rolls. I believe the breakpoint is 1 cast per 3 cd charges recovered (real time, not rounded like PoB says) as you can triple overlap normal spell cascade. Getting my cast time up to HALF my cooldown actually made it feel clunky as I was whiffing a lot of casts due to not having charges available. With my current AoE, 56% net increase on despair for a final radius of 40, I DO get a triple overlap on normal cascade but only for a relatively space right under the cursor.

This thread has better explanations, but does not account for the possibility of triple overlapping normal cascade: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/104cnc9/comment/j3468kg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

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What else is going on?

-Skin of the lords is being used for 100% inc ES, eva, and armor as well as +2 to ID. Corrupted soul + petrified blood + pious path is great with this bonus ES to leverage inq regen extremely effectively, and also enable pain attunement and RF for damage.

-Echoforge has a dex req of 113, which is actually fairly difficult to achieve with this many uniques. Astramentis gets us not only that but actually enough for a level 19 grace (20 with belt corrupt) and also gets us tons of str and int for crit chance. With that we only need 1 str suffix (which again is worth a ton of crit) to enable magnate, so we wear that for big damage and resists.

-Running 3 curses in vixens forces you into eldritch battery + MoM, but with corrupted soul that enables too much bypass and weakens your ES a lot. Instead we AVOID whispers of doom and use reduced cost prefixes on both rings to sustain casting our main curse + only TWO vixens triggers. Not only do we get to fix mana with 2 ring crafts and a "free" clarity thanks to pet blood, we also get to run arcane surge in vixens for 13% more damage.

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What next?

EDIT: https://pobb.in/ZsuaoY4nbmXk IThis was the next step. +2 aoe loreweave is way better than skin, you do give up a lot of damage swapping from astra + magnate to eternal damnation + cdr belt but with 52% it evens out. Also WAY easier to sustain RF even when bossing, and took uber shaper from 4-5 portals per to deathless immediately.

I tried CDR boots + magnate + harmony of purpose jewels and wound up back to ralakesh's, turns out I just hate harmony of purpose even with 10 hits per sec. I also lost some money getting and reselling 2x woke spell cascades when it didn't do enough for my dps to justify, so here we are. Rational doctrine is very expensive for what it does but honestly +1 crit and -10 chaos res felt worth it when there's not that much other wiggle room, could do +spell crit vixens instead but those are also hella expensive and you'd be down a frenzy vs the rational doctrine route.

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Showcase on the cheapest version, some of which I forgot to pause spotify for:

Guardian Map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1rX6o6PoGw

IH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60G-rPv_S4U

Elder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2iui4Xw_D4

Twisted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaoDYhUjHU4

Formed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80PYYNwcI-I

A very ugly Uber Shaper (don't log on and go straight to uber fights unless you can ignore mechanics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0PRZBapR20

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Bonus: ~~If you missed this thread, I'd love anyone to help test what's being suggested, as OP seems to suggest doom blast is FLOOR rounding its cdr to the tick which results in an absolutely ludicrous amount of damage if you reach 52% cdr.~~

UPDATE: having 52% cdr I do not feel like this works how it was implied, even when I used woke cascades, but maybe I'm wrong. EDIT: I think this is false, idk what op was finding but I have 53 cdr and definitely do not feel like I got a hidden 50% more damage multiplier for it

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