Storm Blast of Repulsion Hierophant - Map Blasting and Ubers for 65 Div, My new favorite skill.

<<<MOST IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS>>> Storm Burst of Repulsion plays the opposite of regular Storm Burst for maximizing single-target damage. You DO NOT want to hold the channel forever. Think of it like a blender where you are pulsing food. You want to hold the button down for 0.4 to 0.8 seconds (NO MORE than 0.8 seconds) before releasing and then pressing again as fast as possible. This takes a little while to get the hang of, but becomes quite natural. I found it much easier to do this with a key on the keyboard, rather than a mouse button. For clearing, just hold that button down and spray everywhere, pulse once on a tanky enemy if you need to. Your strength and intelligence MUST be equal, and be greater than your dexterity, to enable the full power of Rational Doctrine. Please see the notes in the Crit Swap and Endgame sections of the progression guide below regarding how to achieve this. The amount of duration you get is VERY important in this build due to the way Storm Burst of Repulsion scales. You want to get enough duration to reach breakpoints of 0.4 seconds of total duration. Any additional duration beyond that will do nothing for you unless you reach the next multiple of 0.4 seconds. With the Potency of Will and Enduring Bond wheels, and the duration mastery for 10% more duration, the anointed Exceptional Performance, a 20% quality main gem, a 30% quality Ashes of the Stars, and a 20/20 More Duration gem, you JUST reach a total duration of 5.6 seconds for Storm Burst of Repulsion. This is a multiple of 0.4, and getting a 21/20 More Duration gem will not benefit you at all. As discussed in the Endgame section of the progression guide, you want gloves with 35% lightning conversion and 15% cold conversion. Storm Burst has a built-in 50% lightning conversion, and you want to convert most of the rest to lightning as well because Hatred is the biggest damage aura, so you want to be able to pump it up with a lot of aura effect on the tree and body armour implicits. If you get gloves with 25/25 conversion, rather than 35/15, you will end up with quite a lot more cold damage than lightning damage once your hatred is scaled up high, which makes Trinity inconsistent. Endgame Gem and Gear Discussion: The first thing to mention is that you must get 10% mana reservation efficiency on your helmet, either from an eldritch implicit or essence craft, as well as an Enlighten level 4 to be able to fit three 50% reservations plus a 25% reservation. I have chosen to use Hatred, Determination, Zealotry, and Tempest Shield. It is highly desirable to get your Storm Burst of Repulsion gem to level 25 to reach another breakpoint for increased base radius. This can be done with a +2 weapon, +1 shield, Ashes of the Stars, and a level 21 corrupted gem, as I have done. Alternatively, if you want to do something else in one of those slots, you can use an Empower gem in place of either Arcane Surge or Infused Channeling. Using Automation with Convocation will not work for triggering the 30% increase damage from the Enduring Bond node. I use the numlock trick to cast the spell constantly to keep up this damage and heal my tigers, whose survivability was nerfed in this patch. To do this, turn numlock on on your keyboard and then assign the skill slot for Convocation to one of your numpad keys (I use Num5). Then, with numlock still on, hold down the key you assigned (Num5), and while holding it, turn numlock off. This will then cause the skill to be hit automatically every time it is off cooldown. Note that this needs to be refreshed each time you go through a loading screen, so turn numlock back on, double tap Num5 and hold it on the second press while turning numlock back off. The energy shield recharge rate I have on my helmet is not strictly necessary, but it makes sustaining the cost much more comfortable, and enables you to run maps with no leech if you so desire. Curse immunity is provided by consecrated ground with extra effectiveness, plus the Yugul Pantheon, plus a few Tattoos. Yugul also provides reflect immunity when combined with the elemental mastery. No extra damage is taken from critical strike with a Determination Watcher's Eye, Armorr/ES mastery, and some tattoos. Freeze immunity comes from Brine King, and Chill Immunity comes from Brine King plus Illuminated Devotion. Shock immunity comes from Tempest Shield. Crafting Your Endgame Weapon: My weapon can be crafted very deterministically for 20-25 divines depending on how lucky you are and whether you feel like buying or farming harvest juice. The steps are as follows: 1) Buy a base (Scepter, although this also works with wands) with fractured +1 to the Level of All Spell Skill Gems 2) Scour the base if necessary to make it magic, then spam alteration/augmentation orbs until you hit an amount of cast speed you are satisified with. 3) Now you need to make the item rare while retaining only the cast speed in addition to the gem level mod. First, regal the item to rare. At this point, you can simply yolo annul for a 50/50 and hope it removes the non-cast speed mod. This is your only option if the regal added a mod with the "caster" tag. If you have T1 cast speed, you can keep it deterministically if the regal mod does not have the "caster" tag. Simply craft "cannot roll caster modifiers" before annuling. This will either remove the regal mod or the metamod with a 50/50 chance. If it removes the metamod, just put it back on and go again until it remove the regal mod. Once you remove the regal mod, you can simply use the bench to remove the crafted mod. 4) You now have a rare item with +1 all spell skill gems and increased cast speed. Craft multimod + suffixes cannot be changed + cannot roll attack mods. 5) Use the horticrafting station to add a physical modifier and remove a non-physical modifier. At this point, because of what you crafted with the bench, your suffixes are full, so it must add a prefix. Because you crafted cannot roll attack mods, the only physical prefix it can add is +1 to the Level of all Physical Spell Skill Gems. 6) Once again, use the bench to remove crafted mods. You now have a rare with +1 all spells, +1 physical spell, and cast speed. 7) Craft multimod on the bench again, then craft spell damage/chaos added hybrid, and critical strike multiplier. LEVELING AND PROGRESSION GUIDE: Note that this build has very basic gear requirements overall, so your main priority at all times should simply be getting a good amount of life, armour, and energy shield while capping your resistances as early as possible. I have not created separate gem sets for each of the progression steps, as this will vary a lot depending on what gear you are using to enable (or not) Trinity and in what order you decide to grab mana reservation bonuses. Normal Lab: Storm Burst of Repulsion is great to use right from level 12 when it becomes equipable. If you are starting fresh and do not have the gem, you can play regular Storm Burst or simply use the old reliable Magma Orb into Armageddon Brand. After grabbing the nodes right in the Templar starting area, I suggest going directly for Elemental Overload. Next, if you are playing either version of Storm Burst, you will want to head south to grab the Potency of Will duration wheel, and then the Enduring Bond minion wheel. If you are not playing either Storm Burst variant, then the duration nodes are probably useless for you, so progress elsewhere along the laid out skill trees. For early reservation skills, I suggest Herald of Ice, Herald of Thunder, and Clarity, which will likely be necessary for your early mana sustain. If you have access to some twink gear, Hrimsorrow gloves will give you the early conversion required to run Trinity support as soon as possible. A Praxis unique ring will completely eliminate your mana costs for the foreseeable future, so you can drop Clarity and run Herald of Ash. At that point, you should be ready for normal lab, where you will become a Hierophant and take the Arcane Blessing node. Crual Lab: Grabbing Spiritual Aid on the left side of the tree will turn those early physical/minion damage Templar nodes into powerful 20% nodes, and give solid damage overall. Sovereignty will allow you to add Herald of Ash on top of the other two herald and Clarity, and Divine Judgement and Arcane Capacitor will give a large amount of extra damage plus mana sustain if you are struggling in that area. For the second lab, I suggest grabbing Conviction of Power for the Endurance Charges, although you could certainly prioritize Illuminated Devotion if you would rather have the extra area of effect and leech. Merc Lab: The priority here is to travel over to Eldritch Battery, which will let you reserve all of your mana with Determination, Hatred, and Tempest Shield. Depending on the state of your gear, you may need to use something other than Hatred to be able to maintain the effectiveness of Trinity by balancing your cold and lightning damage. This is when I suggest grabbing Illuminated Devotion for your third lab. Uber Lab: At this point your cast speed is probably becoming quite high, you are likely no longer using Praxis, and you may not have any energy shield recharge rate on a piece of gear, so you will take the Light Eater wheel to help sustain the cost of a 5/6-link Storm Burst of Repulsion. The instant leech mastery is also very strong, as we hit quite hard many times per second. This basic setup comfortably carried me through all four voidstones with Elemental Overload and approximately 1 Divine Orb total into my gear. This early power with little investment is crucial, as it allows you to farm comfortably for the relatively expensive upgrades you will want before making the swap to crit. Your first big power spike for the build in terms of gear is an Ashes of the Stars amulet. You absolutely want one with a perfect 30% quality roll eventually, so I suggest simply saving for that. If you can get a lesser one for very cheap, which you should be able to past the first week of a league, then it is likely worth doing so. As soon as you have an Ashes of the Stars, or even on your previous amulet if you wish, you want to anoint Exceptional Performance, which only requires a Black Oil as the most expensive component, so don't hesitate to anoint it on a cheap amulet if you don't have your Ashes yet. As soon as you are able, you will want to buy a Farric Tiger Alpha and go kill Farrul for the Huntleader ascendancy node. I also suggest crafting a minimum endurance charge on a ring and grabbing the extra maximum endurance charge on the tree when you are able. Crit Swap: I have included another gear set showing the basic kinds of things to go for as you are transitioning to this later version of the build. I do not suggest trying to make the swap to crit any earlier than the early 90s, as your passive points will be spread too thing. This is also where you should be looking to grab a Militant Faith jewel with Avarius for Power of Purpose to enable Righteous Fire of Arcane Devotion. Be sure to get one that doesn't brick any of the notables in the radius. This is when things start ramping up in terms of cost and output, and a bit in terms of gearing complexity. As mentioned above, your first priority should be getting a 30% quality roll Ashes of the Stars. Then, although you can technically make the swap beforehand, I suggest waiting until you can afford a hatred crit Watcher's Eye and Rational Doctrine before swapping to crit. I had no issue farming and saving up for these items running Elemental Overload with garbage gear. This is where a bit of complexity comes in, as you need to balance your strength and intelligence to enable both sides of the Rational Doctrine jewel. This can be accomplished by buying cheap tattoos to reduce your intelligence until it is close to your strength, and then crafting strength or strength+dexterity on any piece of gear as a suffix, rerolling the craft until your strength and intelligence are equal, and ensuring that both are higher than you dexterity. You also want a couple of dexterity rolls elsewhere so that you can use a high-level Haste aura in the March of the Legion boots, which you will want to get at this point. Look to get a decent spell critical strike chance roll on your weapon here as well. Endgame: Just as before, you want to prioritize high amounts of life, armour, energy shield, and resistance capping. You also need to keep in mind the balance of your attributes. This can be done in many different ways depending on what items you are able to buy/craft, so use mine as an example, but note that those attribute suffixes can appear on different pieces of gear as needed. You will want to replace the cheap intelligence tattoos with a few to reduce curse effect on you and then several to reduce the critical damage you take, in addition to looking for a Watcher's Eye with Hatred crit and Determination reduced critical damage taken. Grabbing a Cord Belt will allow you to anoint another passive, which I suggest using on Whispers of Doom. Even though it may feel somewhat odd to anoint a node that you are pathing right by, we need Whispers of Doom either way, and anointing it saves four points, allowing us to grab a three point jewel slot next to Eldritch Battery, which allows us to slot in a physical damage Light of Meaning to the west of the Templar start for a very large damage boost. No other anoint will give you as much damage as you gain with this setup, and I don't think anything else on the tree is droppable to recoup those passive points for the extra jewel slot. At this point, you will definitely want to be ditching Hrimsorrow for some real gloves so you can use Hatred effectively and use the best supports for Storm Burst of Repulsion while making Trinity work. I suggest buying some gloves with fractured 35% physical to lightning conversion and crafting them how you see fit, and using Greater Eldritch Ichors to get 15% physical to cold conversion as an implicit. Such fractures are widely available now with the new syndicate node that drops fractured veiled items.