[3.10]The CEO of lightning Storm Brand Hierophant [Retired]

Yeah, no reason to use clarity-bm without the eye. I personally just run Portal and Faster Casting.

f1rstborn how does your necromancer goes?i see your lvl 96 on it,can i see some playstyle?

Maybe this is a really dumb question, but couldn't we just run Clarity without Blood Magic for the Watcher's Eye setup? I realize this ties up 34 mana, but it seems like a really small price to pay if you really need the extra gem slot, and one that would be cancelled out by the % increased maximum mana on the WE, anyway.

Of course, I can understand using BM if you have room for it, but I'm using a LW setup, so it's already pretty cramped.

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WorderMostFoul wrote:

Maybe this is a really dumb question, but couldn't we just run Clarity without Blood Magic for the Watcher's Eye setup? I realize this ties up 34 mana, but it seems like a really small price to pay if you really need the extra gem slot, and one that would be cancelled out by the % increased maximum mana on the WE, anyway.

Of course, I can understand using BM if you have room for it, but I'm using a LW setup, so it's already pretty cramped.

Pop it into PoB, and see how much of a %dps loss it is. I'd imagine its minor, but haven't checked myself.

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drgrizzlybeard wrote:

Spoiler

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Miyokard wrote:

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drgrizzlybeard wrote:

Can someone answer a new player some questions?

https://pastebin.com/bLBqZrp0

This is my current build. I don't get why I only have 6.5k ES and not 7k+ like OP does.

And should I upgrade some Items right now or should I save for the Watchers Eye already. I have ~17ex to spend.

Also did I any mistakes so far I oversee?

Use Discipline aura too not just the vaal one.

Ty, I feel the dumb.

Can i replace the current helmet for Crown of the Inward Eye
Prophet Crown?? and if yes , do i need to change anything?

At ~5M DPS with ~10K Mana its 10K DPS loss when on 1/20
at 20/20 it is ~100K DPS loss. While a Precision 1/0 is like 30k dps raise. And a portal is QoL, make your choice.

First let me say I'm really enjoying this build. I love the mobility and speed. The main issue i'm having right now is getting one-shot by pretty much every boss t11 onwards. I'm used to have the bulk to take a few normal attacks from bosses but even with arcane cloak I don't have anytime to react.

I've invested about 10ex in the build and have 7kES. As i continue to level i'm taking more mana/ES nodes over crit to try and be less squishy:



Thanks!

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darkknight04 wrote:

First let me say I'm really enjoying this build. I love the mobility and speed. The main issue i'm having right now is getting one-shot by pretty much every boss t11 onwards. I'm used to have the bulk to take a few normal attacks from bosses but even with arcane cloak I don't have anytime to react.

I've invested about 10ex in the build and have 7kES. As i continue to level i'm taking more mana/ES nodes over crit to try and be less squishy:

Thanks!

Hmmm...most of your setup is pretty on-point. I can make a few suggestions; hopefully you can get a reply from f1rstborn since his answers always offer top-tier insight.

I think generally we want to to get your mana pool bigger, since both our offense and defense scale heavily with mana investment.

1. Replace your wand! This is probably the biggest thing. It's basically only providing you 130% increased spell damage and a little mana. Get a wand with at least +150 to mana and it will make a big difference both in terms of survivability and damage. Relatedly, seeing elemental resistances crafted onto your wand is not a great sign; generally speaking--and certainly for this build--you never want to be reliant on your weapon to shore up your resistances. (Also, you need all 3 sockets linked for WoC to actually apply Conductivity, so doing that will make a big difference for your boss damage.)

2. Juice your amulet! That's another easy one. Get it to 20% quality with fertile catalysts and put an anointment on it. There has been much discussion about what the best options are; I think the best ideas are listed in the guide. I use Mana Flows, but there are other good (and cheaper) options that will provide you more mana, an extra brand, etc. I'd go for the mana.

3. Take another look at your flasks--
a. All flasks should be at least 20% quality.
b. Mana flask prefix should definitely be "Catalysed". Scour, get to 20% quality, craft until you get Catalysed, then beastcraft of Staunching suffix.
c. You don't have any warding flasks, which is a surefire way to get screwed in maps with Temporal Chains or Vulnerability. You also don't have a quartz flask, and the phasing element of the quartz flask is pretty important for a build that basically just runs through packs of monsters. I'd replace your Atziri's Promise with an experimenter's quartz flask of warding for mapping and then swap out your QS flask for Atziri's when you're bossing.
d. Best QS flask for mapping is probably chemist's prefix and adrenaline suffix. I'd go for that and move the "of heat" suffix to the diamond flask (curing suffix isn't really very important).

4. Not sure how popular an idea this will be, but divining or replacing some of the uniques (as appropriate based on which option is cheaper) could reasonably score you another 50+ raw, flat mana, which of course equals a noticeable bump in mana pool and therefore eHP and damage. I'm specifically looking at Mindspiral, Atziri's Foible, and Skyforth (though Ivory Tower could also be improved upon). This one obviously requires some currency.

5. The belt is pretty good, but you ultimately want a stygian vise so you can stick an abyssal jewel in with ES and mana (and resistances, if necessary). Fossil-crafting a good one is generally pretty easy. For the moment, at least spam blessed orbs on the belt and two-stone ring so you can maximize their implicits.

6. Get Vorici in research and have him craft a white socket on your Ivory Tower so you can replace Controlled Destruction with Chain Support (extremely helpful for safer mapping). Swap CD back in for big boss fights.

7. I'm not sure what the logic is in having Arcane Surge in two setups. Your high-level AS should be active pretty much all the time if you have your keys bound correctly. There are many possible configurations that work, but, for example, if you assign Arcane Cloak to left-click and Brand Recall to right click, you can just hold down both mouse buttons and run around and everything pretty much dies. Replacing the low-level AS with Second Wind will help your mobility while costing you basically nothing (aside from the few Vaal and chromatic orbs needed to recolor the sockets).

8. Skill tree:
a. Refund "Mana and Mana Regeneration" node right below Arcane Capacitor, refund Soul Thief, and use the 3 points to take Mind Drinker. You already have ES leech via Illuminated Devotion ascendancy.
b. The node directly above Cruel Preparation is objectively better than the one above Deep Thoughts (10% increased mana vs 8%).
c. Use your next two levels to grab Arcane Focus and then the two levels after that to get the jewel socket below Mind Drinker.

All of this should provide you at least another 1k ES and various other improvements. If I made any suboptimal recommendations here, someone please call me out!

Your wand and belt could be upgraded quite a bit. The wand could have 100-150 more mana than it does, spell crit chance, crit multi, extra chaos dmg, etc. Check the calculations tab on your PoB and check how much spell damage you've got, but I bet it's quite a bit. Your dps will probably go up with a high mana roll even if you lose a lot of lightning/spell dmg bonus. Your curse isn't part of your CoH link? Does that work? Your belt could be abyssal, giving you room for a jewel with a big chunk of mana, ES, phasing on kill, resists, or whatever you want.

You could boost your dps by quite a bit for cheap by grabbing a voidbringer with higher mana cost mod. There's a 76% one on trade for 3c right now. That'd also let you reconfigure your links so that the gloves hold your arcane cloak for +1 lvl. You should try dash instead of flame dash as well and see how you like it.

If it's not too much hassle, you may also want to consider selling your shield and buying one with the normal 12 all res implicit. Up to you, but I suspect when you next upgrade your belt/rings you'll be able to get quite a bit more mana/ES for the same price if they need fewer resists. Same logic for Faith and Steel node, if you haven't taken it.

Why bother tanking hits? I just kind of circle around bosses from moderate range. It helps to use a trigger spell crafted suffix to cast WoC and conductivity (blade blade blast as third), because then you can just focus on positioning and watching out for attack animations rather than offense.

Sat down and played with the popular cluster variants posted in the comments, even other build guides that use clusters for storm brand.

I have to say that for most players, as they did me, they come up severely lacking compared to OP's build.

Cluster socket? Stick a Fevered Mind in it.

Chaos for Chaos, OP's build is insanely efficient and super strong (I'm currently crushing t15 maps with ease) with mid-level investment (think 10-50 exalts).

Of the balanced cluster variants that had both damage and survivability, they usually traded either damage or survivability in the tree for clusters, leaving me completely gimped with my "50ex build". It is only when I put in 100's of ex in the rares; wand, amulet, rings, belts, watcher's eye, etc that I started to get a well rounded build again.

So my conclusion is that if you only plan to invest <100ex, stick to OP build and stay away from clusters.

But it will cap out on both damage and survivabily (though high). To go further you need to first improve your rares to insane levels using hundreds of exalts, then switch to clusters to min/max further.