[3.21] Acceleration Corpse Kitava (0.066s cooldown triggers) (warning: NOT visually friendly)

PoB:
https://pastebin.com/87qcmcSZ
Alternately just import characters from 'biyte', level 96 necromancer in standard league [and press F to pay respects]
(keep in mind the character is far from optimized, don't even have a watcher's eye):

Raw hit damage HP:
~8100hp not including energy shield
Broken down:
Defences:
A modest 9k armour (determination and sprinkles of armour on gear)
71/77 block

Enfeeble + Sigil of power (~70% stage 4 uptime)
Steelskin (~50% uptime or on demand)

Life Sustain: Fire damage leeched as life delve ring
Mana Sustain: Trust me bro (elaboration later)

"Guardian/Pinnacle boss" dps (Approximation):
630k (DD) + 588k (VD) + 144k (unearth) ~= 1.3m dps

... alright that was pretty tame. But whatever, i got my 52%+ cooldown recovery rate, I was happy.

As state above, Kitava's thirst can make this into a "one button build", unlike most other forms of VD/DD.

Corpse pact will provide your character with a very sufficient amount of attack and cast speed that will make things like casting curses, divine blessings, wave of conviction (manually?! doesn't feel terrible in this build!) leap slams, feel nearly instant, providing great utility choice and mobility in combat.

And being a necromancer, you get nice bonus skill effect duration for more QoL.

Another bonus that you get is "the pre-cast":
In lots of fights, there will be some downtime where the boss might be changing phases, or you have the choice when to engage and start the fight, or the crucible monsters are still spawning in, delve mobs still spawning, etc. In this time, you can ramp up a lot of volatile deads before the fight begins and get an extra burst of dps opening into the fight while making sure you get good mobility, both of which make a lot of fights much safer.

Everything sounds ridiculous. Looking closely you claim to have determination, but its a divine blessing! Theres no chance you are sustaining mana with this kitava's thirst AND keeping determination up!

The mana fine tuning:
First of all, mana is spent with the help of archmage. Seems pretty straightforward, but this is not an archmage build. In fact, looking closely I actually have over 5000 mana. Simple math on the gems and archmage will tell you that it will cost me over 450 mana per use. However a Kitava's thirst build has no need to spend 450 mana per use. It only wants to spend ~100 per use, and instead spend it more times. That's why I stack reduced mana cost on the tree and occasionally on some jewelry crafts.

The first couple of obvious pieces to help the build work:
Mana mastery: 10% chance to recover 10% of maximum mana when using a skill
(I didn't actually even use a watcher's eye this league because I didn't get one)
essence of insanity necklaces, nexus/aetherwind gloves all help.

Essence glutton ascendency notable can help, but I chose not to take it. small percentage based regeneration is completely outdone by the above. Actually, this character runs no regen maps without problem. Though I still bring mana flask as part of core flask kit, even outside of no-regen as additional instant healing for safety, or when I need to spend more than a few frames in a mana siphoner/other dot.

Mana reservation:
Ok, so I actually have over 5000 mana, but only ~3400 not reserved? Choosing to run petrified blood and reserving, isn't that a huge waste of mana?

So the reason why we are OK with spending mana is because that mana is already sufficient for being a mitigation resource for all damage. We still want more MAXIMUM (unreserved) mana, because it will increase the recovery rate as the insanity necklace, clarity watchers' eye and mana mastery all only care about maximum mana, while archmage only looks at unreserved mana. Reserving mana while increasing maximum mana actually helps curb the mana expenditure and makes the mana sustain more consistent.

Earlier we mentioned reduced mana cost. The added benefit of this is that my determination divine blessing, which would normally cost about 2600 mana, instead costs 200 mana. I can basically spam it all the time. I even put arcane surge on it as an additional buff effect that helps remind me to keep the defence up.

Low life almost a pure damage tradeoff. I decided to go low life since I like having good recovery : raw hp ratio (low life almost doubles the effect of recovery) but not going low life makes the build a bit tankier in terms of raw HP. Petrified blood can be swapped with mana reserved tempest shields.

Low life with the 55% life mastery node is about 92% the raw HP of a non low-life build, and tempest shield is lower reservation than petrified blood, giving even more Mana leniency, so going non-low life is more survivability and gem sockets.

There are a few more caveats associated with going low life:
I am specifically tuning my arrogance gem so that I reserve exactly down to 55% life because if I go over, I have a Life cost associated with my skills. Generally this is no big deal, but if I ever happen to use my divine blessing while at 56% hp... the reduced MANA cost is exactly that: it will only cost 200 mana, but will cost about a thousand life still and you will be at slightly heightened risk of death for a bit. And this will happen again any time you use a life flask, so try to tune it to exactly 55% if going low life. Sources are like minion delve rings, enlighten, prism guardians, and different combinations of auras/reservations...

Well it's what the build is based off. Double corrupting for +4 gems (+AoE gems and +Fire gems) is the best, if you can stomach wasting all those double corrupts on this vendor trash. I did a few but didn't get anything out of it.

I'm using inspiration because the damage is pretty comparable to something like Fire Penetration due to the elemental mastery that inverts resists, and the fact that sigil of power is lightning damage. It also helps with mana a bit, the triggers go from ~20 mana per spell -> 2 mana per spell due to how much stacked reduced mana cost reduction I have already. Other good choices are combustion, controlled destruction (kind of annoying with elemental overload though), concentrated effect, and elemental focus (though I didn't have fire damage sources elsewhere to make use of fire mastery). Awakened spell cascade is obviously an incredible support gem, but that stuff is out of my pleb hands.


The only decent passive tree I have. Ended up spending about 80 essences (mixtures of block essence, life essence, and chaos resist and to try to roll it), and never got anything better than 3 usable affixes + the essence affix...
The amount of affixes That are alright on this character are immense. Mana, Life, spell damage, fire damage, chaos resist, block, even spell block for overcapping I would take, + gems, + regular resist..

Anyways, a random rare shield is actually not even good. The best in slot item by far is Scales of Justice. Equipping scales of justice gives about 40% more damage. I just couldn't get a cooldown per power charge affix on it and I really wanted to play with 0.066 cooldown.



Pretty awful stats but turns out to provide good quality of life, being a sceptre for leap slam, spell crit keeps the power charges up much more consistently (and with better ramp times), and even chaos resist... well does something for the character. the 15% crucible cooldown recovery is crucial for this build. I had several good damage wands with the cooldown node, or + all gems, with cast speed, or flat damage, but due to absolutely ridiculous luck, every single one had +10% INCREASED mana cost of skills crucible on them which pretty much bricked it. That 10% turns my 120 mana cost into over 200, and the 200 mana cost divine blessing to nearly a thousand, and without the watcher's eye, I wasn't willing to risk going that low on mana (because mana is raw hp, and the mana recovery is not smooth)

I still prefer to keep bone offering in this for QoL, it is most reliable this way and ensures I eat at least a few corpses to front load the corpse pact ramping. I tried wave of conviction + combustion, but due to the high uptime of my sigil of power, it frequently just applies lightning exposure and the ignite chance wasn't great.
I also played around with tornado + pcoc as it was probably the most reliable pcoc orb, but in the end decided it wasn't worth it.

When I planned this character, I actually considered going crit with Kalisa's grace. Kalisa's grace is essentially 40% more crit chance. However, I decided against it in the end due to passive tree and gear constraints.

Right now, I am using insanity gloves, but a different gem set can easily be a better choice. Due to the way cooldowns work, until you can get near 22.5 casts per second, do not go over 15 casts per second with 0.066 cooldown. The trigger rate will drop tremendously.
So the difference between not using insanity gloves and using insanity gloves seems to be just a matter of cast speed investment at first, but that is not true.
In fact, non-insanity gloves have a better ramp.
15 cast per seconds means means you will have a total of 350% increased cast speed with unearth. If we consider that we get 200% increased cast speed from corpse pact, then that means we will start out at 150% increased cast speed.
However, with insanity gloves, a total of 350% increased cast speed is actually equivalent to 288% increased cast speed, with 16% more on top. This means we start out with 88% increased cast speed with 16% more on top, which is a starting of 118% increased cast speed. Starting the ramp with insanity gloves feels much worse than starting out without insanity gloves.



Cooldown recovery rate sources, not much to say.


Cooldown recovery rate sources, not much to say.


Insanity amulet is nice, but getting it with +1, or +2 gems is kind of hard. I was content with the life and open prefix for reduced mana cost on a hardcore league, and meager suffixes so I stopped rolling it. Sources of flat damage are also present (sigil of power, scales of justice) so +gems isn't the most important thing ever.


Kind of a desperate item. Couldn't find anything better throughout my delves. Went for every fire node I saw but all rings were hot garbage. I could have chosen not to go leech but I really like leech in this character, especially with petrified blood.


Another mediocre ring, ended up spamming shrieking/screaming essences for dex on many unset rings, verillion rings, even amethyst rings. This ended up fitting my character the best.

A thing I would recommend somewhere is instead of fire leech ring, get a +life gain on hit with spells ring. One thing this character does do is perform many hits.


Uh, another very mediocre item. Just unveiled every chest I found. Some decent alternative are +block, +spellblock (and drop some spellblock elsewhere), damage taken as x prefixes, lightning coil (big physical damage is kind of scary on this character), or just spell suppression.

This character could have probably fit in spell suppression given enough effort in crucible with shield trees, but I never went for it

Some other gem setups I tried fitting in:
arcanist brand + desecrate: a nice single target damage boost. Ended up dropping an unset ring and using momentum support instead, losing 2 sockets needed for it.

About enfeeble: With enfeeble being brought back to 19% less damage, I think it is an autopick in hardcore. Ironically couldn't help me since I died to forge meteor though. I used cursed ground because I liked to delve and it was pretty good at keeping things enfeebled in delves, and precasting for things like crucible and general area control.

Increased area of effect/intensity for sigil of power and cursed ground enfeeble:
Definitely worth considering. Sigil of power is a incredible defence: it is basically another enfeeble, but the effect cannot be mitigated by hexproof.
Because this build spends mana very quickly and continuously, ramps to 4 stages quickly. The main weakness is the long cooldown and small area, if anything moves out it becomes useless for defence and cannot be replaced quickly. Our 56% cooldown lets us replace it relatively quickly though.

A thread in PoE forums
an old attempt at contributing information to PoB for implementation
A spreadsheet to visual cast speed vs trigger rate to help you understand the effects of cooldown.
The only thing different in this build is that now, brackets instead multiples of 10, are now multiples of 15 due to the cooldown recovery.