Static Strike of Gathering Lightning is the New KING of Strike Skills - [PoE 3.28]

Levelling All of these tips assume a fresh start, or at least not using a dedicated reroll build (like Hollow Palm.) If you have another levelling setup you feel more comfortable with you can definitely do that. PConc could also be good on a fresh start but as I'm not familiar with that I don't want to share questionable information about it. The important thing is that you have fun while efficiently clearing the campaign. Before starting your Duelist you'll need to mule Smite from a Templar. Kill Hillock, grab everything, get smite from Tarkleigh, dump into your stash, and then start your Duelist. Make sure to level Smite in your offhand setup. Act 1: Spectral Throw (Buy after Hillock) - Added Fire Damage - Faster Attacks (Both are rewards from the same quest, so take one and buy the other from Nessa. Run Chance to Bleed and Momentum before this.) Frostblink (Buy after Mudflats, you'll be able to put it on at level 5 if you take the Dex travel nodes to the Int node there.) Leap Slam - Faster Attacks/Momentum (Faster Attacks is better but Momentum is an early quest reward if you don't have the currency for another Faster Attacks) Decoy Totem (Quest Reward) You can run Shield Charge in your weapon swap early, before you have Leap Slam. You should do this as long as you don't hate weapon swapping, it adds a lot of speed in the middle of this act. There are a number of little gear pieces that will be huge early on. Amber Amulet/Heavy Belt are both great as we need Strength for our weapons and gems but don't get a lot from the tree. A Rustic Sash can be great early. Ideally we want a 2 handed axe but any good weapon is fine for now as we won't have any weapon specific points for a little while still. RRG is our best early 3 link but RRR or RGG can both work as well. Try to have at least 1 Sapphire Ring by Merveil. You can swap to Smite as soon as you have the "Non Vaal Strike Skills target 1 additional nearby enemy" Mastery, but I usually wait to do this until I get to the A2 town. Act 2: Smite - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Faster Attacks (Ele Damage is a quest reward from Sharp and Cruel, which opens several other decent supports as well. Herald of Ice (Quest Reward) Poacher's Mark (Same quest as HoI so you'll have to buy this one from Yeena) Also make sure you pick up Trinity for levelling in your offhand setup, along with Flesh and Stone and Blood Rage. Help Alira early (you can also choose to Kill All Bandits if you don't want to respec but it's hard for 1 point to beat 15 Elemental Resistance this early) Act 3: Haste / Anger (Anger can activate Trinity, Haste is a lot of QoL, both are good and can be bought from Clarissa after completing Lost in Love) For early 4 links your best colors are RRBG if you can proc Trinity and RRRG if you can't. If you're not sure about this there are a bunch of great resources from other creators, but the general rule is that your second highest damage type needs to have a max that is higher than the minimum of the highest type. For example, if you do 100-1000 Lightning damage and 200-400 Cold damage then your Trinity would work fairly reliably, but if you did 400-1500 Lightning and 200-400 Cold then your second damage type could never be higher than your highest, and you would never proc Trinity.) For the tree... only take the Hatchet Master cluster of nodes if you're actually using an Axe. You should be, but sometimes you'll find a good Sword or something and use that instead. If this is the case then just keep travelling up to Primeval Force and come back for the Axe nodes later. This act is also where you'll probably do a bit of gambling to get 4 links and potentially a new weapon. Gambling is nerfed this league, but I assume it will still be useful to shore up weak spots during the campaign. Act 4: Smite - Elemental Damage with Attacks - Multistrike - Trinity / Added Cold Damage / Added Fire Damage (Trinity is best but you have to make sure you're proccing) Mark on Hit - Poacher's Mark - Lifetap (Mark on Hit can be purchased from the twin vendors and Lifetap back in Act 1.) If you have extra sockets you can also grab a Fire Golem from the quest reward at the end of the act. It's not a lot of power but it does something with an empty socket at this early stage of the game. Act 6 and beyond: You probably want to add in a Steelskin setup at some point, but this is pretty low priority. At this point you should start levelling any gems you see in the mapping setups that you don't already have. If you don't have space in your main links you can always use your weapon swap. You can buy all of these gems by completing The Twilight Strand Quest from Lilly at the start of the Act. Ascendancy Order Lab 1 - Brutal Fervour Lab 2 - Bane of Legends Lab 3 - Headsman Lab 4 - Overwhelm At higher investments you'll likely drop Overwhelm for Masterful Form but 3% flat crit while using Rakiata's Dance is massive for hitting Crit Cap and maintaining defensive layers. I hadn't used this node prior to 3.28 but I decided to try it out and I'm completely sold on it. Early Progression This guide is tailored to trade, but you could absolutely play this build in SSF. You're just going to spend longer getting some of these uniques. I'll have an early maps gear set with barebones stuff to get you started. Once you're strong enough to break into Tier 16s your immediate priority should be getting Rakiata's Dance. For the price this sword is absolutely unmatched, and can easily carry you through Uber bosses and juiced Originator mod content. If you're on a second character and have the money you can just pick this up right away and shift your focus over to every other piece of gear. Prior to getting your 4th lab you should be using a Rare Axe. Hatchet Master is an incredible notable and the Rage generation from the Mastery is great. Once you get your 4th lab you can take advantage of the Sword/Crit nodes and you should be able to generate Rage through other means at this point. Because of our position on the tree it's trivial to cap Spell Suppression. You can get a low roll on a single piece of gear, Eldritch Implicit on Gloves, or even a craft (body armour is the best spot for this.) Make sure you check your build in PoB before you switch away from Precise Technique. My build wasn't stronger without it until after I had gotten my first 2 stones, but this was on a fresh start so your experience may vary greatly. The important thing here is to test out your changes here in PoB before you commit to swapping into Crit. Getting a Lethal Pride asap is huge, essentially solving our Strength by itself. Try to get some combination of Endurance Charge on Kill, Intimidate on Hit, and Gain Rage on Hit (prioritizing in that order.) If you just have the first 2 nodes that's still an excellent starter jewel, and you can always go back later to get one with more useful nodes. You can also look for jewels to go into the other viable socket we have, so you have quite a few options here. You can use the "Find Timeless Jewel" function at the bottom of the Tree tab here, and I've already plugged in the 3 nodes we care about. You can change the jewel socket to search up at the top, and if you want to drop one of the nodes from being mandatory simply replace the last 1 in that line with a 0. The Taming is amazing for damage and ele res at the cost of losing life in that slot. I do recommend using it but if you're feeling squishy and want to level you could drop it for a rare ring with a good life roll and whatever other stats you need to fill out your character. Yoke of Suffering is very similar to Rakiata's Dance. You CAN beat it with a rare but it's incredibly hard to do and would be MUCH more expensive. Because of this you should just pick up Yoke whenever you can afford it and ignore that slot until you're very deep into the endgame. Getting a good Conquest Lamellar is massive for your survivability. If you already have Rakiata's Dance and 6 linking your new body armour would be expensive you can just run a single 6 link in your weapon and put off the second 6 link til you build up your stash again. If you want to craft this my suggestion is to pick up a decent Fracture on a base and use some Dense Fossils to get your prefixes right. If you hit well then you can finish with Prefixes Cannot Be Changed -> Harvest Reforge Chaos (Chaos Res) or Phys (PDR but ONLY if your Prefixes are already full.) Clusters are great but I would wait to put them in until you have good enough gear that you can trim some of the fat off the tree. Getting high res on your gear allows you to save a bunch of points, getting more Suppression on gear saves points, you have options here. I think it's most important for your first Cluster to have Fuel the Fight and Graceful Execution as the notables out front. This allows you to trim some points from your Leech nodes while still keeping Mana Leech and pick up some sorely needed Attributes as well. For the second early cluster you can go with Graceful Execution and either Devastator (Explode/Clear) or Feed the Fury (Single Target.) Medium Crit clusters are good and very easy to make. Harvest Reforge Attack guarantees Quick Getaway so just go until you hit with Pressure Points. If you're already doing well on gear you can Vaal Orb these and fish for strong implicits at a low price. If you're looking for cost effective For Smite links... check whether Increased Critical Strikes or Increased Critical Damage is better for you. If Trinity won't proc then you can run both of these or Added Lightning Damage. Check these out with your own build in here. 21 Vaal Smite vs Imbued This is a really tough call for us. Losing out on the level isn't so bad but when paired with the loss of Vaal Smite this feels like a real opportunity cost. You'll certainly get better single target from an extra support, but then losing Vaal Smite is a real hit to the clear. I think this call will be made based on the content that you're farming, and if you stick to this build you might even keep both options around and swap to match your farms. If you do want to go the imbued gem route some winners from a quick browse in here are Inspiration, Hypothermia, Endurance Charge on Melee Stun, Fortify, and Trinity. Trinity is harder to make work and is less damage than a levelled version but it loses much less from being level 1 than any of our other supports which makes it viable in this slot. Exceptional Support Gems (Smite) Greater Multistrike is obviously good. Greater Ancestral Call adds clear but I think if you're after that you'd be better off running Smite of Divine Judgement and another damage support. Invert the Rules is great if you're not running Rakiata's Dance. Static Strike of Gathering Lightning Swap This is a new skill in 3.28 that I was excited to test but didn't want to include in the first versions of this guide for the league. The clear feels incredible and you can get better single target numbers than Smite but it's a bit harder to work with. You can't easily run Multistrike as you only get 1 stack of Gathering Lightning per Multistrike, or once every 3 attacks (4 if you're using Greater Multistrike.) This means your mana cost goes up as you're paying for each attack rather than once every 3 or 4. This means we'll want at least 1 ring with Non-Channeling Skills have -7 to Mana Cost, and I'm currently running 2 myself. You also want some form of range extension through a combination of melee strike range (mostly from the tree) or additional strikes (Greater Ancestral Call / Sione's Ambition anoint.) I like Sione's the most for this, and then if you're doing dense content where you need even better clear you can pull out Volatility for Greater Ancestral Call. I did this farming Breach/Beyond for the 99-100 grind and it felt smooth the whole way. If you're very early in progression or in SSF and have yet to find these then you can take Bladedancer and the mastery for some extra strike range. I've tested without this and the skill is still strong, but it feels a lot better to play with it. There could be certain setups where you would prefer a different anoint and would rather run Greater Ancestral Call to improve your coverage. Pay attention to your stacks of Gathering Lightning. If you're not reliably hitting 12 stacks in single target scenarios you'll need more Attack Speed. You can anoint Exceptional Performance early on to bandaid this, and if you're using a Rare Belt then you can get a Cord Belt and keep your Sione's Ambition anoint on the amulet. Imbues (SSoGL) Best imbues - Fortify > Endurance Charge on Melee Stun > Increased Critical Strikes All 3 of these are amazing for different reasons. Increased Critical Strikes has the potential to save you a bunch of passive points and can even help you move from Overwhelm into Masterful Form. Fortify gives you reliable access to a strong defensive layer along with some damage, and has been my choice so far. Endurance Charge on Melee Stun is the highest damage once you've switched to Masterful Form as the gem gives full damage benefit at level 1. There are a lot of other good options but these are the ones that stood out. Bricks - Brutality, Void Manipulation, Elemental Focus Plenty of supports are useless but these will actively brick your skill gem so I wanted to make sure I noted these. If you're unsure about another option that you find you can go to PoEDB, search Static Strike of Gathering Lightning, and click the Supported By tab. You'll get a list of supports that can affect the skill gem and you can hover the one you're looking at to see what exactly what it gives. Lategame Optimization Eventually we drop Overwhelm from our Ascendancy and pick up Masterful Form. You'll want enough points to access all 3 Frenzy Charges on the tree as well as the ability to reliably hit Crit Cap without the 3% flat crit. This means you're probably not swapping until you have a Rare Sword that's good enough to beat Rakiata's Dance. For reference I'm still using it at level 100 in 3.28. Refracting Fog opens up some really cool options for Large Clusters. If you Fracture 3% Attack and Cast Speed with Elemental Skills and then switch to an Axe/Sword or Two Handed Melee Enchant and hit 35% Inreased Effect of Small Passives and 3% Attack Speed then each small point gives you 16% Increased Damage and 8% Attack Speed. For the last mod you want either Increased Damage or Life, but you can settle for anything that isn't a notable. The important part is getting both AS mods and 35% Increased Effect of Small Passives. The one downside to this is that you can't get Attributes or Resistances from this Cluster, so you'll need strong gear to compensate for using 9-12 points. Mageblood is a common endgame goal and is our best belt option outside of strong (and much more expensive) variants of Screams of the Dessicated. I like to use a Sapphire Flask + Purity of Ice in conjunction with Melding of the Flesh to get 85% Max Res (86 later when you can easily get more Aura effect.) Diamond Flask and Silver Flask both feel mandatory for big crit and buffed Onslaught. Your last flask is flexible, but if you just got the belt and the rest of your gear isn't as min/maxed the best option here is probably a Jade Flask, with an honorable mention to Quartz Flask if you're struggling to cap Spell Suppression. Once you hit 90% Max Res you're better off with a Granite Flask, and if you don't care so much about defenses you can run a Gold Flask. Progenesis is hands down the single biggest upgrade to our survivability. It's very expensive but it's worth it, and even if you were to add Mageblood I think you would continue to use Progen for mapping as it's just that good. You could carry a Tincture with you and swap for bosses if you don't mind that and feel like you need the extra DPS in those fights. The single best large upgrade overall is a Foulborn Unnatural Instinct, but if you have one of these you're either very lucky or you're an above average player. This thing is insane and in 3.28 it's priced to match. It is likely still worth the pricetag, but I don't imagine most want to grind that far on a single build. If you do decided to go for this then you don't need both mods, just the mod that grants bonuses from unallocated notables. The only difference is 20 Int, which can be helpful but hardly justfies steep price increase. Map Mods We can't run No Leech maps regardless of build choices. We can't run Ele Reflect without using a Pantheon + Elemental Mastery/Ring mod. We can technically run Steal Charges but I always avoid this. If you're using The Taming + Yoke of Suffering then you can't run Avoid Ailment maps (you can but it feels awful.) If you're trying to level you should probably also avoid Max Res maps, but this is more of a general rule than anything build specific. Hopefully this helps some of you have a good time!