PoE Brand builds without Svalinn

Perhaps Lowlife? Would this feel bad without playing Assassin Crit? I'm pretty interested in Heart of Destruction for larger explosions, Shaper of Storms for guaranteed/better shocks, and Bastion of Elements for damage absorption. What are your thoughts? &x200B; I've changed direction to focus on the golem route. Here's what I'm working with so far. Any thoughts?

I Spend around 35 ex Crafting/Buyng to take maybe 85% of the perfect gear. \- It's not a perfect PoB, just an reference to end game setup

I've been trying to narrow down my league starter for Heist the past couple of days. Somewhere along the line, I decided I want to do a cold DoT Occultist, more specifically a Wintertide Brand Occultist (SC-trade). I have a few reasons (that may or may not be valid, politely let me know). Full reasoning summaries below, but TLDR: I think cold DoT Occultists will survive nerfing and might even be buffed by new Hexes. Wintertide brand also feels safe from nerfing, is non-meta, and there is always Vortex to fall back on. I may or may not be able to take advantage of new Hexes more easily. Al

POB: Guide: Please ask any questions and I'll try my best to answer them. This is my attempt at making a strong non-meta build in a league where any item you can think of, you can make. General synergies are in Necromancer's Corpse Pact notable. COC allows us to autodetonate corpses through Asenath's and have reliable proc rate on Brands (we don't need any +1 brand notables). We almost always hit 20 stacks on penance detonations, resulting in massive chunks of damage.

Hello again everyone. So, last league I didn't had a chance to play archmage storm brand (mostly because I thought it was way too strong and a lot of people were doing it already, so it was not that interesting to me). But I really really like mana builds and Indigon is one of my favorite items in the game so I decided to give mana Storm Brand a try and it turned out to be pretty strong/fun so I decided to share it with others. EDIT: Hmm, I just noticed that I forgot to enable Clarity in that Minotaur vid, oops :d For some backstory of the build: I originally did not planned to actuall

TLDR the skill got a lot more viable than it was before, but still isn't great. 3.11 buffed Armagedon Brand significantly, about 40% more damage with ignite, making it competitive with Fireball - plus the nice mechanical advantage of using brands. Pros: - Good clear speed. Ignite prolif is my favorite mechanic in the game, it kills respawning enemies like Beyonders and delve nodes in an effortless way, and makes Blight encounters super easy. - The brand hitting repeatedly makes Emberwake ring pretty good, for very long ignite durations and more damage (from 2x ignites) - Off-meta gear