[3.17] Lightning Warp Inquisitor

LEVELLING: ===================================================================================== lol ITEMS: ===================================================================================== Before looking into the items keep in mind this build scales pretty linearly with upgrades and has many small powerspikes. Personally I feel that this helps the build's flexibility greatly and allows you to substitute certain parts for what you have to use. The items in this PoB are just about as Best-in-Slot as I could get but there are many mechanics you could substitute to scale your damage/survivability. While I won't go into detail about every item, you're mainly looking for added/%increased lightning damage and cast speed throughout. Plus to gems is, as usual, a massive damage boost and one of the largest reasons for running Bronn's Lithe. Otherwise, you're looking to get resists, energy shield, and life on whatever other rares you can fit in. The chestpiece option is pretty flexible in terms of uniques, as I'll explain down below; You could probably make better rare chestpieces but I am lazy. MANA: ===================================================================================== Inspiration used to lower the mana cost of LW, Fanatacism ascendancy makes us use no mana for whatever reason, so that's pretty neat. Inspiration stacks quickly so make sure to cast during Fanatacism downtime. Voidbringer gloves bring a lot of DPS to the table but make our job of sustaining mana a bit more difficult. Fanatacism will no longer give us free casts, but is still crucial as it reduces the added mana cost from Voidbringer enough to make it a lot more managaeable. While I strongly recommend just respeccing into this build, the mana regen from clarity on top of an enduring flask should give us enough mana regen to be able to sustain max cast speed ea. If you're able to invest/upgrade, a Shaper ring with mana on spell hit allows us to toss out the mana flask. Note that the one in this build also carries life on spell hit, which is an insane boost to clearing survivability for this build. Imbued catalysts can be used to buff the mod. CHESTPLATE: =================================================================================== To quickly summarize, we have pretty flexible options for our chestpiece. The main requirements we are looking for is that it is 5 blue 1 red links and +2 to AoE Gems (Duration works if you can't find aoe). It's pretty easy to find a Tabula to socket in for pretty cheap. Your best in slot option is a Bronn's Lithe but that comes with the steep price of being a nightmare to socket craft. 5 blue 1 red on a 144 dex base is dismal, but luckily we have Harvest crafts to help us out; spam socket colour crafts and use "Reforge the colour of a non-Blue socket on an item, turning it Blue" until you hit 6 blues, then repeat once with the red variant of the craft. Good luck. If you actually don't hate yourself consider Inpulsa's. PLAYSTYLE: ==================================================================================== Synopsis: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Realistically the strongest advice I can give for this build is to play it in whichever way you die less. While I can pat myself on the back and say this build has higher survivability than my previous attempts, you will die. This is not a tanky build by any means and relies on speed, luck, and the grace of whatever divine entity you think could help you survive repeatedly jumping into packs of monsters. MECHANICS: ===================================================================================== FANATICISM ----------------- This build's main mechanic is the absurd amounts of cast speed gained from Fanaticism. We can abuse Fanaticism to reduce our mana costs and blow our cast rate out of the water. Honestly, it's not a very good ascendancy, but it's fun. Fanaticism works by giving you a charge if you have attacked in the past second. Upon reaching 4 charges, you gain the Fanaticism buff for 4 seconds (75% More cast speed, Reduced Cost, and Increased AOE) . In theory, this would allow for 100% uptime of the buff, but in practice it's nearly impossible to keep the buff uptime that high due to attack speed, interruptions, tankier enemies, the list goes on. In this build, we use Leap Slam as the attack of choice, as it allows us to travel while building Fanatacism stacks and also stuns any full health enemy, which is extremely useful given that we are diving into packs of enemies on a rather squishy build. We support it with Faster Attacks to counteract its base attack time modifier. Another possible option is Shield Charge as it attacks faster, but doesn't stun. Note that I have not done any testing with Shield Charge so it may or may not be a viable option for this build Since we have an overabundance of cast speed, lightning warp works quite well as our main spell as it does an AOE hit twice per cast. *In perfect conditions* we will be hitting with lightning warp about 26 times per second. With Orb of Storms we can toss that up to ~40 hits/s. This allows us to just stack a lot of added lightning, and since our ascendancy gives us Battlemage, that allows us to roll for flat added lightning on our staff instead of added spell. These many hits help us out a lot combined with the ring mentioned above. ---------------------------------- CONSECRATED GROUND ---------------------------------- Lightning Warp works far better with the Consecrated Ground ascendencies than Fanaticism ever could, because we are basically always stationary and do not have to stack possibly the clunkiest fucking mechanic in this game. That being said, I would not run this build as is with Consecrated Ground. This build makes heavy investments into cast speed to justify running Fanaticism. Instead I would look to invest further into Flat added and %increased lightning damage, maybe switch out chestplate for Inpulsa's. Replace Leap slam with Flame dash. HOW TO: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This build is designed to be rather straightforward for the most part. While clearing, you're going to be wanting to weave between casts of Lightning Warp and Leap Slam to keep up your Fanaticism. On reaching larger packs or beefy rares, toss down Orb of Storms. If you feel you aren't clearing as well as you'd like to, swap Increased Crit Damage for Chain while clearing. Binding Phase Run+Second Wind to MB1 gives us phasing and movespeed for whenever we aren't casting. This is wildly unnecessary. i just really like Phase Run. if you want something more useful, I would highly recommend replacing Phase Run with Steelskin, which gives us a much appreciated buff to our hit pools. (+10k phys, +16k ele) When bossing, stack Fanaticism before entering if possible, drop Orb of Storms, Assassin's Mark, consult with your potions, and go to town with Lightning Warp. If still alive once debuffs wear off (and the shame sets in), run away, weave to stack Fanaticism, rinse, and repeat. A full 29 hits of Orb of Storms adds about 8.5m damage to our full rotation. Lightning Warp will do about 37.5m damage throughout the rotation. Assuming we're making full use of Fanaticism, we can average this out to about ~11.5m DPS and about 46 million damage per full rotation. PLEASE NOTE: This is assuming absolutely perfect casting conditions. While this build has enough base cast speed to be smooth, our cast rate is our damage condition, and not being able to make full use of it is a detriment. The best tipI can give is to be mindful of your Fanaticism stacks; it's literally half of our damage. In terms of anoints, we anoint Safeguard to cap resists and get a little extra spell block wherever we can. If you want to go for a big DPS boost, you can swap the Vermillon ring for a Fire/Cold Two-stone ring and anoint Mark the Prey instead. SHOULD YOU PLAY THIS BUILD? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you're looking for a price efficient build that can easily do most content, this is far from the place you should be looking. This build, while I'd argue it can hold on its own, is just not a viable build to progress through the game efficiently with, and you will only find yourself more and more frustrated if you take this build on without some critically needed gear at the ready. That being said, this build is fun. Real fun. If you've found yourself wanting to play something funky or off-meta, I'd say this is a very nice choice to go for. It's fast, does pretty decent damage, and is *very* flashy. Just make sure you have the patience and the portals for some harder bosses. CREDITS: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MASKA 1SCh - me lul IGN: ShickityShaco also gonna credit Jousis here because his original Lightning Warp build was definitely the spark for this. While his original build was made a while back, if you're interested in a far cheaper, and *almost* starter friendly version of this build, it might be worth looking into updating it for 3.17 as a lot of it remains unchanged.