[3.19] Malachai’s Loop Self-shock Lightning Conduit Raider

TL;DR Unique interaction: Ralakesh’s Impatience + Malachai’s Loop + Shock Prolif can be INFINITELY CONSUMED by Lightning Conduit.

"""
220916 Update post-Build of the Week:
"Budget" PoB: https://pastebin.com/1hkAyty9
> No Forbidden jewels, No Impossible Escape
> Ascendant instead of Raider
> Flask sustain alternative: Pathfinder from Ascendant, Medium cluster jewel with flask duration, Exarch implicit on Body Armour
> Evasion cap alternative: Blind from Flesh and Stone, Wind Dancer
> Freeze/chill avoidance alternative: Abyss jewels suffixes
> Exposure alternative: Helmet trigger Wave of Conviction
> Suppression alternative: Magebane, Wise Oak replaced by Phasing flask
"""

PoB: https://pastebin.com/54zUwvUX
Explanation video: https://youtu.be/AKbeKLiIi4k

Features:
> Minimal micromanagement – auto-flasks, one button, consistent DPS output
> Smooth clear, 8M DPS single target
> Decent survivability: 95% evasion, 100% suppression, 5k ES, 30%+ physical hits taken as elemental, permanent Ruby, Topaz and Sapphire flasks
> Recommended budget: 10 Div (Vessel of Vinktar price highly volatile)
> Orb-walking melee-ish playstyle

Noteworthy interactions (Thanks Neato):
1. We use Ralakesh’s Impatience and Malachai’s Loop to inflict shock on ourselves whenever we stand still (i.e. start casting Lightning Conduit).
2. We proliferate the shock on self with Vessel of Vinktar (rare proliferation variant), while making ourselves Unaffected by Shock via Replica Winterheart (or Inpulsa’s Broken Heart), which does not affect the proliferated shock on enemies (so “increased Shock effect on you” mirrored downside sadly doesn’t work).
3. While most regular shocks (such as the one from Vessel of Vinktar) are removed from enemies once expended by Lightning Conduit, proliferated self-shock seems to be constantly re-applied, so each self-shock can sustain a baseline of 4 second of unlimited Lightning Conduit casts on all nearby enemies, making it an incredibly efficient skill. (Possibly an oversight)
4. (Negative interaction) Ailment avoidance (e.g. from Avatar of the Veil ascendancy) will make us unable to self-shock from the shield, so some orb-walking is necessary, and some Ailment Duration scaling is good QoL as the base duration is only 2 seconds.
5. Inner Conviction Keystone from Militant Faith is a great damage multiplier that does not affect Minimum Frenzy Charges, and we benefit from the +2 Maximum Power Charges from the shield. All benefits from charges are “snapshot” when we stand still for a brief moment to cast the spell, making it efficient to stack bonuses from Power Charges (helmet implicit, passive tree top, good Malachai’s Loop).
6. Forbidden Flesh/Flame from Nature’s Boon and some flask investment to provide permanent Vinktar uptime, while also allowing us to use Coruscating Elixir to reach Low-Life for Pain Attunement, and Taste of Hate for physical damage mitigation. Conveniently they give good elemental damage mitigation.
7. Impossible Escape around Arrow Dancing gives access to Flask cluster, which is more efficient than medium cluster jewel for flasks.
8. Dread Banner and flat Evasion chance from Grace Watcher’s Eye is great for evasion builds that generally have diminishing return with Evasion investment. We can reach 95% evasion cap with just Raider Ascendancy and 25k Evasion Rating.

Build story below.

Motivation 1: Building around Ralakesh’s Impatience

This is a truly unique build that I am really proud of. The motivation originally is to find good uses for the unique Unique Ralakesh’s Impatience. There are two eye-catching features: rapidly losing charges and rapidly getting maximum charges. Malachai’s Loop, Replica Tulfall, The Gluttonous Tide and Kingsguard immediately comes to mind. The stats for Replica Tulfall and Kingsguard were slightly too weak for what they offer and I’m unable to come up with good builds with them, and unfortunately Gluttonous Tide doesn’t work, since the moment you reach Maximum Frenzy Charges (i.e. becomes stationary) those charges you cannot lose, and the moment you start moving again the charges are lost immediately without the “reaching” trigger. I did end up league-starting with a stationary Bodyswap flicker-esque build, which downed most of the Eldritch bosses but in the end DPS fell short.

On the flipside, Malachai’s Loop works perfectly as I would expect.

Motivation 2: Exploring the self-shock

Self-shock was not a new concept, there were old videos demonstrating how to create shock auras with Maligaro's Restraint. There have been also some interesting Fulcrum builds.
Basically, we need 4 elements:
1. Source of self-shock. For us it’s the Shield + Boot combo. Every time we stand still, we are shocked for 4 seconds. This shock can be Avoided, which is what we do NOT want.
2. Source of shock proliferation. Vessel of Vinktar is the choice because of its large proliferation radius and price (an alternative is the Uber Uber Forbidden Jewels for Ranger). Every source below 20 radius is too small for the playstyle to be comfortable personally, but there are Storm’s Gifts and Eater of Worlds Glove implicit mods out there.
3. Sources of increased Effect of Shock. This is for the damage multiplier on the new Lightning skills, as the self-shock from the shield has a baseline of 15% effect, we need 233% (333%) increased Shock Effect to bring that up to 50% (65% with Lightning Mastery). Note that self-shock from Malachai’s Loop cannot be augmented by support gems like Unbound Ailments or Elemental Proliferation, since it is not a Skill.
4. Source of “Unaffected by Shock”. This mutes the downside of Shock on us but preserves the shock effect on enemies. Shock immunity is not OK since we cannot reflect what is not on us. Also reduced Effect on Shock (e.g. from Garukhan Pantheon) is insufficient as that is only subtracting from the increased Effect of Shock from #3, so it’s unrealistic to “unstack” so much reduced shock effect on self. Currently there are only 3 sources for Unaffected, and since our boot slots are already occupied, Elevated Crusader mods are not considered, leaving us with Inpulsa’s Broken Heart or Replica Winterheart. I opted for the amulet to use a more defensive body armour.

Side note: On paper, Vessel of Vinktar itself should provide a potent 50% self-shock, however it did not proliferate with its other mod. Perhaps it’s purposedly worded/implemented in a way that the shock is not “inflicted” or “applied” on you, but rather just “set” for the entire flask duration. In addition, the 10% shock aura is sadly just a single-use Shock fodder, you will have to run away from the enemy then back into its radius in order to reapply, which is impractical.

Build Mechanics

Here’s the jackpot for my tinkering: self-shock auras can infinitely sustain the new lightning spells. I’m not sure if they are never removed or are constantly re-applied whenever the spell is cast, but as long as you are shocked and they are within the small proliferation radius, you can cast as many Lightning Conduits as you want, and they benefit fully from the Shock effect.

Originally I planned this as an orb-walking build, where you walk and cast, every time you cast enemies are freshly shocked, then you walk to lose the charges before you shock again. So I am pleasantly surprised to learn about this. It may be an oversight given how they handled other persistent shock auras like Corpse Pact and Skitterbots, but frankly with the amount we need to invest into self-shock, it should stay as it is.

Flasks

Supplementing this core concept we need permanent flask sustain. Unfortunately, Vinktar is one of the most charge-hungry flasks out there, so it requires quite a lot of investment. I started with the Nature’s Boon ascendancy, and two rings of flask passives. The bottom right flask passives are conveniently all captured with Impossible Escape around Arrow Dancing, though this way we miss out on the 10% flask effect mastery. The Traitor is also a budget choice, though that takes away quite a lot of potential in the form of Inner Conviction and at least one flask slot.

Solving the problem with Vinktar means the most expensive flask is satiated, so we can basically fit in any other flask we want. Coruscating Elixir is a natural choice for Pain Attunement, and Taste of Hate is a great defensive option. These also conveniently cover all three elements. For the remaining two, I preferred a Quicksilver for QoL and a Wise Oak since the build is quite Unique-heavy, so some free resistances are always nice.

Note: I have greedily dreamed that the prolif radius would scale with flask effect, resulting in quadratic multipliers for AoE, alas it was not the case despite not being an "Unscalable Value". An AoE of 20 is really small - even smaller than Vortex, but we have rapid move and cast speed so it's still smooth "melee" gameplay as long as we one-shot mobs.

Charges

Ralakesh’s Impatience basically translates to full charges while casting. To take full advantage of this and the +2 Power Charges from Malachai’s Loop, we invest into power charge scaling. Inner Conviction from Militant Faith is the perfect match here since we manage to keep the benefits of Frenzy Charges (though only the damage portion since the charges are lost when we move). The Power charge passives on the top part of the tree are great too, and that helps a lot in capping our critical strike chance, and the mana sustain issue.

Defences

Raider’s phasing ascendancy makes it easy to cap Spell Suppression with just two sets of passives on the tree. We get 100% Freeze and Chill immunity from 50% from ascendancy, 30+% from Taste of Hate and another 20% from an abyss jewel.

Against attacks we get 95% chance to evade. Dread Banner and flat Evasion chance from Grace Watcher’s Eye is great for evasion builds that generally have diminishing return with Evasion investment. We can reach 95% evasion cap with just Raider Ascendancy and 20k Evasion Rating. This does make Ghost Dance less potent, so change as you wish.

The build does suffer from the lack of recovery options and the small health pool against damage over time. Vinktar’s 20% life leech coupled with Ghost Reaver counteracts some degen, but against ground effects and Shaper beams we can only rely on our high mobility with permanent 200% Onslaught.

We also easily inflict max Sapped thanks to Algor Mortis. A side effect of non-damaging ailment scaling means chill is also quite potent. A Vortex supported by Bonechill gives us a consistent 24% chill. The action speed differential between us and enemy makes our melee-like encounters a lot safer.

Damage

We get a lot of good multipliers. 260% more damage from 65% shock on the skill gem, Inner Conviction, Pain Attunement, 400% crit multi, exposure and 100% increased damage taken on enemy via 65% shock + 35% Algor Mortis. In addition, we also get some potent % increased damage via Power Charge stacking. We don’t have a lot of flat added damage, but overall a consistent 8M+ DPS is formidable, and can be improved with better gear and awakened gems.

Slight annoyances

While free exposure from Avatar of the Veil ascendancy is nice, it's a non-bo as we sometimes avoid the self-shock. If we stick to the orb-walking playstyle is largely not an issue, but sometimes when I feel lazy and stand still the self-shock may wear off and not always re-activate, which is bad because we will deal 0 damage without it.

Also, one trade-off for running Dread Banner for evasion is the need for 155 Strength. One could replace Herald of Thunder for Flesh and Stone opting for Blind instead.

Finally mana sustain is rather annoying to have to deal with. There's no way to work around it, just have to stack enough mana regen, or use Inspiration Support.

Congrats on making such a unique build and having it showcased by GGG! Looks amazing!

Thanks for sharing, you made it to "Build of the week"!

Incredibly solid build, seeing every unique flasks perma sustaining makes mageblood look like a joke

Dope build! Does shock reflect + vinktar being constantly reapplied also work with fulcrum, or is it specific to malachi's loop? This concept opens up a whole lot of possibilities like fulcrum and badge of the brotherhood if defenses can be balanced with them

You should consider adding in void battery, badge of the brotherhood, a +1 power charge helmet, and inpulsa's. This would let you get 10 power charges + 10 frenzy charges while casting. Inpulsa's unaffected by shock mod would let you get rid of replica winterweave and possibly help with clear (destroys corpses which is nice). The damage would be way way higher that way I'm pretty sure.

From there you just need some aoe and movespeed to make the build feel smoother.

Cool build, definitely a worthy feature.

Very unique build! This is why i love poe,almost every build are possible if you're creative enough,also congrats on making it to the build of the week by GGG

"

Jrock1210 wrote:

Dope build! Does shock reflect + vinktar being constantly reapplied also work with fulcrum, or is it specific to malachi's loop? This concept opens up a whole lot of possibilities like fulcrum and badge of the brotherhood if defenses can be balanced with them

Fulcrum works in the sense of self-shock prolif, just that
1. I find the opportunity cost high over wands for a spellcaster, since it does not provide too much damage itself.
2. You still need a way to inflict shock in order to reflect that onto you. Vinktar's by default is just 10%, which makes it 50% harder to scale to max.

"

Raicoron wrote:

You should consider adding in void battery, badge of the brotherhood, a +1 power charge helmet, and inpulsa's. This would let you get 10 power charges + 10 frenzy charges while casting. Inpulsa's unaffected by shock mod would let you get rid of replica winterweave and possibly help with clear (destroys corpses which is nice). The damage would be way way higher that way I'm pretty sure.

From there you just need some aoe and movespeed to make the build feel smoother.

There is definitely damage potential, then again it is my personal preference to make the build more defensive. I find it difficult to get sufficient flat ES with Inpulsa's to feel comfortable to play, but feel free to explore the concept! :)