Saw the recent hype behind the explode totems and decided to give it a try. I vibed the most with the Chieftain variant posted, however I wanted to see if I could crank up the damage in exchange for some defense. As a disclaimer, I think this is the worst variant of the build, as even investing next to nothing into damage is more than enough to absolutely decimate every enemy in this game. I just thought it was funny to get a big POB number, so I went with this. There's definitely room for more optimization, this is pretty much my first draft of actually making the build.

POB: https://pobb.in/bAeCch8uiUmd

Uber Sirus showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFZfTOHqP_c

###Thought process

Let's start with my thought process going into making the build. At first I saw the fire conversion and thought maybe elemental conversion with damage as extra chaos would be a fun idea and result in a TON of damage, so I played around with eternity shroud. I had an okay version of Eternity Shroud working but it was just sort of disappointing and would require several uniques to be chanced, so I scrapped that idea.

Since I was essentially back to the drawing board, I felt I needed to settle on an ascendancy before throwing on items. Since the build is relatively difficult to scale, I bounced between the two (PF and Chieftain) that have already been iterated upon, as well as every Shadow ascendancy for various reasons (More damage from Trickster, base crit from Assassin, and trap stuff from Sabo), before landing on Elementalist. My idea was to scale up chill and shock effect and utilize Heatshiver for a massive amount of damage scaling.

The next idea is where I think I got a little too lost in the sauce. I decided the way to scale my build was to utilize Heatshiver and full cold conversion, then supplement that with the new Shroud of the Lightless to leverage a massive amount of elemental penetration using both fire and cold damage. The main issue with this is that abyssal jewels offer next to no damage scaling for this build, other than more penetration and some ailment effect (which is entirely unnecessary with how much base damage we have). I ended up just using them for ailment and stun avoidance to give the build some QOL.

The result of this is just an insane amount of damage. POB estimates around 350m dps, and there's a TON of room to grow as well. A synthesized +1 bow base, a better crucible tree, a 3 socket Shroud of the Lightless, actual flasks, and better clusters are all immediate achievable upgrades that can massively increase the dps, but it's just so unnecessary.

###Build Challenges and Explanations

This build was incredibly challenging to put together because there are so many problems that need to be solved. Fortunately it's so broken that there are a myriad of solutions that don't cost too much.

The first challenge I ran into was how to scale the build. The build scales off very few things, namely Totem Life and Physical Damage. I went with Cold Conversion to add more avenues to scale the build, but also found that generic gem levels worked great as well. This made a +3 bow with an Empower a no brainer. I believe that the bow route is the best way to play the build, as it's very affordable compared to the redblade with the GG mod, and allows for freedom in the chest space, as opposed to requiring a skin or dialla's to get a ton of damage.

Once I decided how I wanted to scale the build and landed on Shroud of the Lightless, my first thought was getting a rare pair of gloves with an Abyss socket and 60% cold conversion through Eldritch Implicits and a Veiled mod. This also required me to grab a Cold cluster on the tree for the 40% mastery. I didn't realize just how far a cold cluster was from the Witch/Templar area on the tree. Swapping over to Hrimsorrows ended up being much easier on the wallet and saving me enough points in the tree to make up the socket I was missing.

The next issue was Abyss Jewels. They just suck for scaling this build at all. If we could stack base jewels instead, it would be a LOT better of a build as we can roll totem life and global phys damage. I decided to just buy 1-10c jewels and not worry about it that much, since the damage I'd be missing is probably not worth the price. If I had to do this part over again I'd probably be more patient and aggressive for either corrupted pen implicits or explicit pen rolls along with getting ailment avoidance wherever possible.

The biggest hurdle in this build was definitely mana. I wanted to ensure I had enough mana regen to be constantly spamming traps, but that's probably not necessary. Either way, getting the mana cost low enough to pre-fire the traps on bosses is important, so some mana investment is necessary. Fortunately for us, not many auras even scale the build, so I didn't really need to invest into mana reservation efficiency outside of a small cluster (-1 abyss jewel sadly) + sovereignty as well as a few mana cost reduction nodes on the tree. I didn't even need to use a unique abyss jewel in my Bubonic Trail. Finally, the new life Mastery that makes skills cost 30% of life instead of mana brought the cost low enough for me to be able to spam the traps without worries. If I were to improve on this build in the future, I may invest a few more levels into the Dreamer wheel, and try to get enough MRE to fit in Grace or Determination just for the extra defensives, as currently it feels pretty abysmal to map despite 6k life. Also, all of the mana issues can probably be fixed by a mana flask but alas.

###Final Thoughts

This explanation was very long winded, but overall I had fun making this build. It's not gotten old to see bosses just get eviscerated in a single server tick. That being said, this is probably the absolute worst way to create this build. You could probably make this build immortal and still get at least 1/3 of the damage, which is probably 5-10x more than you'd ever need to easily destroy uber bosses.

If you want to do this build, my only recommendation is to NOT follow my POB. This was mostly done as a meme/proof of concept, as well as a fun POB puzzle that I wanted to solve for myself. I definitely think there's stuff to take from my build, but copying it is not recommended.

This ended up being a lot more writing than I thought. Hopefully y'all found this interesting as this was super fun to put together. As for overall budget, I'd say I spent around 15 div total, but pretty much all of that was in crafting the bow and the Empower 4 (which was 6d when i bought it). If you have any questions about the build let me know and I'll do my best to answer!