POB: https://pobb.in/g4TXQLEsNwGk

Path of Exile 2 is right around the corner, and I thought I'd do a full guide for my Black Cane CwS Blade Blast Pathfinder. This is probably my most successful home brewed off meta build and takes advantage of some really cool interactions.

Build Overview

This is my take on the Cast When Stunned archetype, and is quite different from the traditional Chieftain ignite approach. This build utilizes a lot of underrated uniques which can't really shine outside of highly specific builds, with the star of the show being The Black Cane. We also use Blade Blast as our main damage skill, which is usually clunky to build around but works incredibly well for our build due to a few clever interactions. The end result is a chill, comfy build that is very tanky for most content with excellent map clear and acceptable single target damage, all at a moderate budget.

Build Concept

• The Black Cane is a unique heist exclusive sceptre that grants a unique buff, Phantasmal Might. Phantasmal Might grants global flat physical spell damage to spells per summoned phantasm, scaling with the gem level of Summon Phantasm support. Summon Phantasm is a support gem that gives a skill the chance to summon a phantasm on killing an enemy, or hitting a rare or unique enemy. A level 21 Summon Phantasm gives a maximum of 11 phantasms, resulting in the Phantasmal Might buff giving a total of 484-726 added physical damage at max phantasms.

• This is a moderate amount of flat added damage, but we need to consider a few extra factors. For starters, this is global added damage that applies to every spell that we trigger without taking up a support gem. The next crucial part is that this is added physical damage, which is the best type of added damage due to the high availability of "physical as extra chaos damage" mods. The build utilizes Ming's Heart for a crazy 72% phys as extra chaos, with another 20% from the tree and cluster notable for a total of 92%. We have now nearly doubled our flat added damage to 917-1394. To put it into context, this is about the same flat added damage as Archmage support with around 5.8k mana that is applied to every spell without using up a support gem. This combination of added physical and chaos damage is perfect, as all of it can poison.

• So now we need to figure out how to reliably summon and maintain these phantasms. Our spell of choice is Tornado of Elemental Turbulence, linked with CwS, Summon Phantasm, and Culling Strike. Tornado of Elemental Turbulence has a very high hit rate, homes in and stays on enemies, and lasts for a while so it is very reliable for culling enemies during mapping and hitting bosses frequently for single target, giving us near permanent uptime on phantasms. Additionally, since we're a poison build, we run Deadly Ailments on our Blade Blast which decreases our hit damage, so there's less chance of it "stealing" the kills from Tornado. There is some flexibility here though, many other spells like Firestorm of Pelting work just fine as an alternative but doesn't seem to be as good for single target.

• The phantasms are extremely squishy, especially with no investment into minion life. To keep them alive, we run a medium cluster with Blessed Rebirth, which grants invincibility to recently summoned minions. They usually die soon after their invincibility runs out, but we have no issues resummoning them soon after.

Gems

Blade Blast

• Blade Blast is a skill that detonates lingering blades created by other skills. Since we are a CwS build, we can simultaneously trigger multiple skills such as Bladefall and Ethereal Knives of Lingering Blades to rapidly and automatically create lingering blades for Blade Blast to consume. This is our primary damage skill.

• Blade Blast can also shotgun. The really insane interaction here is with Ethereal Knives of Lingering Blades and Returning Projectiles Support. With this, the ethereal knives blades will shoot out and return back to your feet. This means that if you are standing right on top of a boss, the Blade Blast will shotgun all your EK blades, which is 18 in this build. This is an incredibly powerful interaction for single target damage but requires some careful positioning.

• Of course, that's not even including the overlapping explosions from Bladefall. We have Bladefall linked to Awakened Spell Cascade, which creates a lot of blades across a wide area, giving the Blade Blast explosions excellent coverage for mapping.

Cast When Stunned

• To enable our Cast When Stunned setup, we use a combination of Skyforth with Blood Magic. Skyforth sets our stun threshold to be based on our mana, and Blood Magic sets our mana to 0, which means we will always get stunned. This also opens up a valuable ring slot as we don't have to run Valyrium like traditional CwS builds.

• Skyforth comes with the huge downside of disabling life regeneration. However, since we are a Pathfinder, we can use Master Surgeon to have a huge amount of persistent life recovery from our life flask. Life flasks are not considered life regeneration and are unaffected by Skyforth (this also means we can run no regen maps).

• The defensive part of the CwS shell comes from the combination of Bloodnotch and Progenesis. Unlike other CwS builds, we don't utilize Petrified Blood and instead scale Progenesis with flask effect from Pathfinder to achieve the same result. With the combination of Tides of Time, Pathfinder ascendancy, and flask effect on the tree, we hit 60% Progenesis flask effect, which lets it delay 40% of the damage taken. The remaining 60% of damage taken is covered by a max rolled 60% Bloodnotch, while the degen from Progenesis is handled by getting 24% recoup on the tree and anointing Infused Flesh for another 18%, for a total of 42% recoup. This combination basically makes us immune to any hit that doesn't one-shot us (but there are a few exceptions of hits that do not stun).

Utility Spells

• We have a few free sockets that we can use for our utility spells.
  • Purifying Flame is an option to give consecrated ground for pseudo curse immunity along with Hateful Accuser.
  • Frost Bomb can be used for reduced life regen against annoying rares. You can put this in your Bladefall link as it is also affected by Spell Cascade.
  • Void Sphere of Rending can be used to pull enemies closer for better overlaps of Blade Blast explosions.
  • Despair is also automated and can go in the Bladefall link as it is also affected by Spell Cascade.
  • Blood Rage gives frenzy charges for mapping and conveniently drains our ES to remove the stun chance from having ES.

Playstyle

The playstyle is very chill, as we don't have to press many buttons besides movement skill and life flasks every few seconds. You are mostly just running around the map for enemies to hit you. For single target, you want to stay on top of the enemy for the Blade Blast to shotgun.

The build is really good at content with dense pack size and can easily do Ultimatums, Expeditions, Strongboxes, etc. It can do Simulacrums as well, provided you don't get the "enemies steal flask charges" mod in later waves.

Defenses

• As mentioned earlier, Bloodnotch + Progenesis with recoup basically makes us hit immune.
• Physical damage taken as fire with some conditional physical damage reduction from pantheons.
• Endurance charges generated with Inexorable.
• Max elemental resistances from triple elemental flasks scaled with flask effect.
• Passive life recovery from permanent life flasks.
• 25% less damage taken over time from Hardened Scars anoint.
• 100% spell suppression with 56% prevented.
• Elemental ailment immunity with Stormshroud.
• Poison immunity with 10x poison avoid tattoos.
• Bleed and Corrupted Blood immunity with life flask.
• Conditional crit immunity from poison mastery.
• Maim and Hinder immunity from the tree.
• Around 5-5.5k life.