PoE Occultist, Mageblood, Lightning builds

This league was by far my most successful. I started out as poison seismic sabo and had a great time. The dps was lackluster for endgame so instead of dumping loads of currency I built a CoC Ice Spear Occultist. That character deleted bosses, especially Lycia; the downside was how squishy it was. I had trouble doing invitations and if I wasn't on point with my timing certain pinnacles would make me use a portal. Not the end of the world, but I HATE dying. So I farmed a ton with a(n) RF jugg (made maps so trivial and since you never die you just zip through everything). That got old and I misse

I commented in a thread about my CI Poison Spark build the other day, and there seemed to be some interest about my approach to what is quite a popular build this league, so I thought I'd make a post. My philosophy is that I want to hit the DOT cap, with good Wither uptime, and after that I focus on hit damage and defenses, namely in the amount of a high ES pool. At 10.31 casts per second (11.27 with Smite active), the build is extremely mobile and generally hits the DOT cap in 2-3 seconds, depending on the arena. I eschew Awakened Deadly Ailments and Awakened Unbound Ailments in favor of A

I'm looking at some other Poison Spark Occultists on poe.ninja and trying to figure out how their DPS is so much higher than mine. I've got a couple questions on where to go from here: I'm seeing a lot of use of Steady Torment. I'm sure I'm missing something super obvious. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out where bleeding is being applied from. Big differences in gear I'm seeing are Grand Spectrum jewels & weapon. Even adding

Saw somebody post their Poison Winter Orb build earlier today and thought I'd share the Poison Ball Lightning I made. It's more or less identical to Poison Spark, both in tree and gameplay feel, except for bossing when I swap gems and rings. You (probably) shouldn't play this? It does feel a tiny bit worse than Poison Spark in doing most things. But it was a nice change of pace for a bit, and I have a strong suspicion that as long as you have an Original Sin, you could get Ball Lightning going farther on a smaller budget than Spark. (i.e. if I had no Mageblood or Nimis or Grand Spectrums e