Ailment effect for DPS - A Wild Strike Warden build

This is my leaguestarter, which I've continued to push into T17s after getting my voidstones. It's a Wild Strike Warden with a scaling mechanism I don't see a lot of chatter about: effect of non-damaging ailments. By building into that, the build achieves impactful (ideally capped) shocks and scorches on endgame content, which is a fairly large damage multiplier. This is not some kind of immortal god build with infinite damage, but it's a pretty low-effort one-button approach that works fine for the overwhelming majority of content.

• Current PoB: https://pobb.in/0SXxdXt5uDpq
• poe.ninja for a time machine: https://poe.ninja/builds/settlers/character/horser4dish/worseradish
• T17 Fortress (up to boss kill): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-6hTAqacA
• Black Star invitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzJLvarind0

I haven't thrown the build against any ubers, but T17s and normal pinnacle bosses are not a problem. It's definitely more of a mapping build than a bossing one, but it's capable of either as long as you are willing to pay attention to where you're standing.

Offenses

There are essentially 4 layers that scale damage, centered around inflicting element ailments. This has some serious limitations: ailment avoidance mods on monsters guts DPS, as does crit reduction, and having accuracy is annoying. If those don't deter you, here's how it works:

1. It starts with an elemental claw, Nightblade, and a lot of crit & speed on the tree. Nothing special here, aside from aiming for all 3 elements: cold damage to chill/freeze (thanks Oath of Winter), fire to scorch (Oath of Summer), and lightning to shock (at least until Yoke).
2. From a crit mastery, anoint, and clusters, there's 150% increased effect of non-damaging ailments. With crit scaling as a shortcut around having to get "chance to inflict," this means that by just building crit and ailments, meaty scorches & shocks are delivered on a silver platter. This reduces enemy resists by -60% (2x 30% scorches) and makes them take 50% increased damage.
3. Corrosive Elements on a cluster gives a chance to inflict exposure on hit based on tag, and Wild Strike is Fire, Cold, and Lightning. With 6 hits/sec the odds of applying any exposure in a second of attacking is 99.4%, and 82% for any specific element. That's more-than-permanent uptime, and applies -18% to resists with a mastery, bringing the total enemy resistance modifier to -78%.
4. Yoke of Suffering increases shock values since it lets all elements shock, and it grants an additional 30-50% increased damage taken depending on brittle and freeze. I'm not sure if this is multiplicative with shock or additive, but this brings the total increased damage taken to 50% + 30-50%.

The output of this smorgasborg of ailments and their effects is highly variable on paper, and can't be reliably pinned down during gameplay. This sounds bad. In practice everything is just a matter of continuing to attack an enemy and the damage ramps into existence over a couple seconds; once Trinity is online, everything else just falls into place.

In addition, most of the work to raise that damage floor is simply multiplied by all the conditional damage. Getting faster attacks, more flat damage, and increases pay off massively. However I think 7-8M consistent damage and 13-15M bursts is the limit without pivoting to even-more meta angles like Ralakesh boots, tinctures, charge stacking, or rerolling as a Slayer. I'm not going to try any of that, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn there are huge upgrades this doesn't include.

Defenses

This is a softcore build. It primarily scales evasion, and relies on damage reduction/prevention layers that will occasionally fail.

Without Grace or Determination, I was worried about playing armor/evasion hybrid. 10K armor and 20-30K evasion were the numbers I was aiming for, making some assumptions about the new armor bases. In practice... this works fine, and those numbers are very reasonable. For bosses and roided-up giga-rares, manual dodging is and always was going to be required.

1. Evasion is the backbone of the build: two armor/evasion wheels, a life/evasion wheel, and a very cheap Light of Meaning grant around 400% increased evasion. Blind from an Abyss jewel or Dazzling Strikes makes evasion even stronger. When an inevitable hit gets through, Wind Dancer and Barkskin grant multipliers to prevent chains of hits.
2. The new block chance prefix on shields makes 40-50% block trivial to achieve, so almost half the attack hits that aren't evaded get blocked
3. 10K armor for physical hits is... fine, I guess. It's not impressing anyone, but works well enough in maps. With a flask this looks more like 18K, which is almost decent in maps. Unblocked physical slams like Shaper are lethal.
4. While stationary, Arctic Armor reduces physical and fire damage taken. Neat. The build has to be stationary to attack so this is acceptable.
5. Fortify from a chest implicit is reliable while attacking
6. Spells are handled by suppression, Arctic Armor, resistances, and Wind Dancer's "not been hit by an attack recently" reduction. It isn't enough to tank, but that combination buys enough time to recover or avoid follow-ups.
7. There is a single endurance charge. I'm not sure how much it's doing for me, but it's the thought that counts.

One glaring weakness is degens; the build does not handle those well. Currently I have a recombinated helmet with 100 flat life regen on it which helps, but without continuously leeching, all degen pools are no-go zones.

Sap via Sublime Vision, more endurance charges, and other options still exist for making the survivability better. So far I haven't needed more since most things are non-threatening once they have been frozen or killed.

Earlier iterations

The current state of the build is very much dependent on having an Enlighten, eldritch implicits, a good claw, etc. It wasn't always like this, though, and has been in much less-complex states over the last few weeks:

• Before going into cluster jewels, the Ash, Frost, and Storm anoint plus the Elemental Focus notable by the Shadow were the only sources of ailment effect on the build. Everything was focused around simply scaling flat damage and ensuring accuracy stayed up to snuff. This was sufficient to get 2 voidstones, and would have gotten #3 and #4 if I had been more brave.
• For a while I ditched accuracy entirely with a Hits Can't Be Evaded craft on a claw instead of a third flat damage prefix. This took me from 2 voidstones to 4, and my first couple T17s, and is probably the easiest way to play the mid-endgame since it reclaims all the points & affixes spent on accuracy.
• Getting accuracy back into the build took a balancing act of reservation efficiency to swap from a reservation wheel to an accuracy one, but that opens up room to have a third flat damage prefix on the weapon which worked out to about 30% more damage than the accuracy-free version. The cost was having to lose some sockets on gear, requiring an Enlighten and a reservation jewel, and having to ditch a bit of ailment effect for a reservation implicit on the helmet.

Budget considerations

The only competition with meta builds is for 3 things: The Taming, Yoke of Suffering, and a Lethal Pride. A week or two in, this added up to a handful of divines. In the first few days, this was significantly more expensive, but the build can reach red maps without them so if you don't race to 4 voidstones this is no problem.

Most of the gear is simple to craft with a bit of know-how, and I gradually upgraded pieces from worse versions of themselves over time. I farmed the overwhelming majority of the materials myself so I can't put a price tag on any of it:

• Claw & helmet were recombinated from magic items
• Gloves, chest, and shield were Harvest spam on purchased bases
• Boots & ring were essence spam
• Gloves were ID'd off the ground, because sometimes you get lucky

Closing

This build has been an interesting puzzle to solve, and I wanted to share some of what I learned along the way with the community. There are definitely some problems: attributes are tight, the damage ceiling draws near, and getting hit sucks, and a few map mods brick the build... but it functions as intended, and comfortably farms the endgame. If I had to sum it up (tl;dr):

• Investing in ailment effect pays off for DPS if you're willing to accept some build-bricking mods, and Warden can be structured around it with shock and scorch
• For mapping, evasion & armor are quite comfortable without their corresponding auras thanks to the new Atlas bases