[3.11] Cast on Detonate Kitava's Thirst Trickster

Wholly unoptimized PoB: https://pastebin.com/JhEPZKYb

This is based off my current gear. With it, I'm running around mid tier maps with no issues at all. Once I get a Cloak of Defiance, I'll push into higher tier maps, but all you really need to get up and running are Kitava's Thirst, Apep's Rage, and Voidbringer. Atziri's Foible helps out a lot until you get more mana but it's a bit pricey at the moment so if you want to run really cheap, a good amulet with mana/regen/int will do the trick.

An optimized final PoB will be posted once I have all the gear I want.

The best way to scale the helmet is to use 100 mana as fast as possible. Channeling skills don't count as a skill use every time it takes mana so that's out the window, even though getting their costs up is more than doable. The next fastest skill (with simple scaling) is Tempest shield with a 4/second base cast speed. This could easily be pushed beyond 8 casts per second with the right gear. Getting the cost up high would be a bit tricky though due to it's relatively low mana cost. As well, we don't get any damage from the skill itself. This means if we get unlucky with our casting then we'll be standing there shouting at the sky while enemies lay waste to us. I didn't like that ideal.

I looked around for other ways to quickly spend 100 mana and I found it. With this:
Detonate mines has a 0.2 second cooldown built in, meaning we get a base 5 uses per second which we can push down a bit with cooldown recovery from second wind or any other sources of cooldown recovery.
"But this skill costs no mana!" It does, but not anymore!

By combining Apep's Rage and a +60 mana cost Voidbringer, something only possible with 3.11 changes, we can net a +100 flat cost to all skills, including detonate mines.

"But now your mines are super expensive!" Nope! "+x to Total mana cost of skills" does not apply to mana reservation. This is because "Mana Reserved" and "Mana Cost" are considered two separate things to PoE, and the mod on Apep's and now Voidbringer's only apply to Mana Cost. So while detonating the mines are fairly expensive, throwing them down is still very cheap.

"So you're doing mines, why Trickster?" In order to make up for the massive amount of mana we'll be churning through, >500 per second, we'll need to find a way to recover that. Trickster's Weave the Arcane is perfect for that, giving us a 20% chance to recover 10% of our mana on Skill use. That's effectively a 2% per skill use on average. This means if we have enough max mana, we can negate the cost of pretty much any skill. If we have 2K mana, that's roughly 40 back per skill use, meaning we only have to account for 60 * >5 per second mana cost. Here's the fun bit: throwing mines and detonating them count as separate skill uses. Meaning for each mine we throw and detonate, we trigger Weave the Arcane twice. As a result, with 2K mana we really only need to net around 100 mana regen per second to sustain the skill use. A Pittance!

What do we do with all the extra mana regen we get from grabbing mana nodes and Clarity? Mind Over Matter!

The usual suspects for that setup apply. Atziri's Foible helps with mana cost, max mana, and gear requirements so we won't need to hunt for so much strength.

Damage output hangs around 1.3 Million Shaper DPS, which I feel is acceptable at my current gear value (about 40 chaos). With proper gear (jewels, flasks etc.) it will very easily hit 2+ mil Shaper DPS.

This build ends up with about 4K life with decent gear, 1.5K+ ES, and 2K free mana with 40% MOM. That means we can take a single hit up to about 7K and survive which is respectable. If the damage is incoming over time, we can survive a lot more due to the insane mana regen. I'm manually triggering Immortal Call when I get spooked because the 20% mana regen over 1 second mod on Dynamo is crazy strong for this build. I'm considering swapping to Arcane Cloak but I feel it will ultimately be less powerful. We have 40/30 dodge and Some block from the shield. Lots of evasion to dodge some of the heavier melee hits, and we use Smoke Mine for travel which is great not only for teleporting to escape, but also blinding enemies. There's enough spare mana that you could feasibly run one of the purities depending on the situation. The biggest danger for the build is probably poison, freeze, and bleed. Removal flasks for those are easy to obtain.

My current setup:

Quick Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7s-YHLmGMs

More Coming Soon!

Q: Why Trickster?
A: Defensively it's as good if not slightly better than Saboteur as well as giving us tons of mana recovery via Weave the Arcane.

Q: How are you proccing EE?
A: I've got Cold damage for minions on a jewel and Stone Golem in my Malachai's Artifice. It's got enough life and is tanky enough that I can have it up reliably during boss fights. If he dies, Trickster has enough cast speed to get him back up quickly. I'd use Flame golem if it had more life. Technically you could mix and match the element of your main skill and secondary skills in order to get EE more reliably during clearing.

Q: Why Lightning skills? Would this work as another element?
A: I wanted to try out Ball Lightning for the Mines. It also synergizes with Orb of Storms to net another 100K DPS or so on top when it's active. It could be used with any element though and something like Pyroclast Mine might actually provide better damage than BL, but you'll have to resort to general Elemental damage nodes and jewels. You could even do a Physical version with Poison. Would probably overall be a bit stronger, but I wanted to try going elemental for once.

Q: The gif above doesn't match your skills, what gives!?
A: Arc doesn't show up very well when triggered without a target so I substituted it for some other skills for the gif. Ultimately you can use any spell you want so I feel it's better to show off a range of skills than just one or two as well.

Q: The build seems like a pain in the but to play. What's going on?
A: You might not have your detonate mines bound to left click. I highly suggest it as it means your mines will instantly detonate as you toss them. I noticed even if you only throw one mine, it will trigger detonate 2-3 times, so even while you're sticking and moving, you'll push out decent damage.

Any further good questions asked in the thread will be added to this section!