1.3.1 Self Cast Crit ("Legacy") Discharger | Budget Version Included

Want to safely one-shot the whole screen, while being tanky and cool?
Then you're right here.



Introduction

Welcome to my very first build guide. This build is nothing completely new, still I think some might find my version of it useful and might want to try it out.

We use Voll's Protector to generate power-charges on crit. Keep in mind, that the late-game-version utilizes the "legacy" unique amulet Voll's Devotion.

There is a budget version at the bottom of the post, though.

Soo.. what's this build all about? It's a crit self-cast discharge build. I utilize 7 power-charges and
6 endurance-charges to deal enormous damage with a devastating discharge. But not at the cost of survivability! Saffell's Frame, 2 Purities and an 100% uptime immortal call-setup. Roughly 5k life, vaal pact and unwavering stance.

Still, I wouldn't recommend trying this build out in hardcore. It is definitely not easy to play, since you have to monitor your life, mana, flasks, buffs and mob affixes all at the same time. One small mistake could get you in serious trouble. That's why I don't recommend this build to beginners, either. It's fun to play, though.

Here is a link to a spreadsheet offering more in depth calculations.

Pros:

- Ridiculous damage
- maintaining high survivability: 93-79-93 resists, 100% phys immunity
- can do most map mods
- rather cheap.. ( using the budget version )
- fun to play
- fast clear speed

Cons:

- "Hard" to play
- Voll's Devotion-version expensive
- Requires quite a high level to really start off
- Atziri and Uber-Atziri probably not recommended

Offensive stats

Level 82, level 18 discharge. 7 Power, 6 Endurance.


Passives

We focus on life, crit chance, crit multiplier, spell damage and elemental damage. Since we use power- and endurance-charges, specific element-scaling such as lightning damage on the tree would only benefit half of our damage source, and is thus being ignored.

We pick up every power-charge and in addition 2 endurance charges. We also get 90% skill effect duration from the tree to make our perma-ic-setup possible. All in all this results in a level roughly in the range of 87. From there on we pick additional life nodes mostly.

To counter the 50% reduced mana from Voll's Protector, we pick up Eldritch Battery, and 2 mana nodes.

Eventually with gear we want to reach 95% crit chance on our discharge, which requires a total of around 1000% crit chance. We get 335 from passives, 350 through power-charges.

Final Passive Tree

This build is also possible as a Shadow or a Templar.

Gems

Our main link is discharge obviously. Minimum requirement is a 4L, being discharge - life leech ( to not die against reflect ) - mana leech ( to sustain our mana pool ) and either increased critical damage or increased critical strikes.

To generate our starting power charges we use ice spear with gmp and faster casting.
We run purity of fire and purity of lightning as our auras, and our immortal-call-setup, a defensive cwdt-setup and lightning warp.

Chest : Discharge - Life Leech - Mana Leech - ICS - ICD - Elemental proliferation
Helm : CwDt ( Lvl 13 ) - Cold Snap ( lvl 15 ) - Elemental Proliferation - Life Leech
Gloves: Immortal Call - Increased Duration - Enhance - Faster Casting/Empower
Boots : Purity of Lightning - Purity of Fire - Assassin's Mark - Reduced Mana
Dagger: Ice Spear - GMP - Faster Casting/Empower
Shield: Lightning Warp - Faster Casting - Reduced Duration

Gems that benefit from quality greatly:

Discharge - 20 increased radius is just great.
Immortal Call - 0,2s additional base duration per endurance-charge is H U G E.

I recommend getting quality atleast on those 2 gems.

Items

My Items




We utilize 4-5 uniques in this build. None of these (excluding Voll's Devotion ofc) are expensive.
Only one of these uniques really grants us good defensive stats: Saffell's Frame. 14 all-res and +4 max resists.

Maligaro's Virtuosity and Voll's Protector take 2 gearslots without offering any defensives whatsoever, which makes the usage of good rares in the remaining slots mandatory. Still, capping our resists is due to the usage of 2 purities not that hard.

The Weapon: For the weapon we use the rather cheap Divinarius. A unique dagger, that offers most of the stats we need: Critical strike chance for spells, spell damage and a neat 10% increased AoE of skills. The only thing missing would be critical strike multiplier. A very good rare dagger can surpass the Divinarius, still I think it's a very fair item to use.

The Chest : In the chest slot we have to use Voll's Protector. We need it to generate power-charges whenever we crit. A 4L is the bare minimum. A 5L is recommended.

The Gloves: Maligaro's Virtuosity. Great gloves for this build. They offer 50% global crit chance, up to 36% multiplier (legacy up to 50%) and most importantly 20-30 dexterity. Divinarius requires 95 dexterity to use and we don't want to spend our precious points on the passive tree for that.

The Belt : Go for a rare belt. Focus mainly on life and then resists. Stats like "reduced flask charges used" etc are also helpful. Eventually you want a +1 to max endurance-charges corruption.

The Boots : The boots are a rather tricky gearslot. We want high movement speed (25-30%), high life, possibly some resist but also dexterity to match our requirement of 95. Gladly you can craft dexterity with haku's armor crafting bench on every pair of boots, which makes the search for proper boots a lot easier. Just search for appropriate boots for coloring with life, movement speed, possibly resists and an open suffix for adding dexterity. Also see the budget version!

The Rings : The best choice are diamond rings, which offer an implicit global crit chance. Go for life and resists. Dexterity can free up a suffix on your boots.

The Amulet: Well if you can afford it, get Voll's Devotion. Since these puppies cost around 20-30 Exalts, you otherwise probably want to use a rare one with life, resists, crit multiplier, spell damage and handy stuff like that.

The Shield: We use Saffell's Frame, a cheap unique shield, which increases our maximum elemental resistances by 4. This is cruicial in order survive double reflect or reflect on a -max resist map. Spell damage is also quite nice. Since we are using immortal call, we do not need block chance, making the spell block also quite usable.

The Helm : Same principle here. Use a rare with high life and resists.

Flasks : For the flasks we use 2 Seething Divine Life Flasks of Heat (instant of remove freeze) for spiky damage and being frozen, 1 Surgeon's Quicksilver of Adrenaline (1 charge on crit, up to 30% additional movement speed) for mobility, 1 Surgeon's Ruby Flask of Warding ( 1 charge on crit, immunity to curses) for double reflect and curse removal, and 1 Surgeon's Topaz Flask of Grounding ( 1 charge on crit, shock removal+immunity ) for double reflect and shocking monsters.

All of those flaks should have 20 quality.

Reflect

One question often pops up: "How does this build do against reflect?". Simple answer : "Good."

Long answer: Vaal pact allows us to leech instantly, which is absolutely mandatory to survive reflect. Still, vaal pact cuts our leeching amount by 60%, making a high life leech gem and good resists important. I did some maths, which I don't want to bore you with, but this build can safely hit normal reflect packs, double reflect packs and even reflect packs on a up to -22 max resist map without taking damage. For normal reflect packs the ruby and topaz flasks are not even needed. For double reflect and -max res reflect they are.

You must not try -max res + ele reflect maps! The ele reflect mod on maps is different from the mob affix! Monsters reflect 12% of elemental damage, while having their aura. The map mod is 18%.

Immortal Call Setup

As i mentioned a few times before, we are utilizing a perma-ic-setup. The concept behind this is, that we use a quality Immortal Call, Enhance for more quality, increased duration and 90% increased duration from the passive tree to create a "rather long" Immortal Call.

With 6 endurance-charges we should reach an Immortal Call of roughly 19 seconds. This negates the downside of this build, which is physical damage, also those super-duper-annoying monsters called "Porcupine Goliath", which explode AFTER you killed them for retarded physical damage, which basically kills you, because you already leeched off of them (yea.. who doesn't hate them).

The only way to counter this are either: Immortal Call, cold damage to shatter them or popping a granite and beg you survive. The first option is IMO the most appropriate one.

Leveling

Level using any spell you like. Since we don't scale specific elemental damage you can use whatever you like. I used Arc until level 50.

Then I already switched to discharge for some testing, but I can't recommend doing that. Do not attempt to discharge before the mid 60s.

And do NOT attempt to discharge before you have vaal pact AND unwavering stance. You will die.

During my leveling I rushed for vaal pact and unwavering stance, while picking up all the crit nodes. Then filled up the life nodes after I reached maps.

Here are a few leveling-items, which I find extremely helpful:
Click here to see them


Trees:

Starting off
Around level 50
Entering Maps


Videos

Quick 72 Jungle Valley, No Regen+GMP with 81
I'm currently leveling up and will provide videos of higher maps soon.

Budget Version


I recommend reading the "normal" version first.

Since most can't afford Voll's Devotion I'll write a budget version for my Discharger.
We can't reliably generate endurance charges, thus rendering the Immortal Call-setup useless. We have to use another concept against physical damage, especially against "Porcupine Goliaths", which WILL kill us if we don't. The CwDt-setup helps a little bit,but still it is not enough.

I came up with the idea of using The Blood Dance unique boots to generate frenzy-charges on kill. They also offer dexterity, which comes in handy. Using Blood Rage would also be an option, but I personally do not like using Blood Rage on a Life based Vaalpact character.
If you have no problems with that, you could also use this option.

Frenzy-charges allow our discharge to freeze when we crit, negating the danger Porcupines offer. Still, that doesn't really save us from normal monsters hitting us.
We swap out the ruby flask for a granite flask and the purity of fire for purity of ice (because of reflect). Try to get some armour on gear.

Since we don't have to get the endurance-charges and skill-effect duration nodes on the tree, we can get some more life nodes.

I don't recommend going for additional frenzy charges, which could case some problems against reflect, since we don't use a sapphire flask.

Instead of the Immortal Call-setup we use Vaal Spark - GMP - Added Chaos - Life Leech. This skill WRECKS everything. It is mainly used for dangerous packs we don't want to be near of or map bosses.

Passives

The passive tree is quite similar pathing wise. We drop the endurance-charges and skill-effect duration and pick up more life and other stuff.
Since we can probably not afford a high quality Discharge, we probably want to pick up some AoE nodes.

Final Build

Gems

Chest: Discharge - Life Leech - Mana Leech - ICS - ICD
Gloves: Vaal Spark - GMP - Life Leech - Added Chaos
Boots: Purity of Fire - Purity of Ice - Reduced Mana - Assassin's Mark
Dagger: Ice Spear - GMP - Faster Casting
Shield: Lightning Warp - Reduced Duration - Faster Casting
Helm: CwDt(Level 13) - Cold Snap (Level 15) - Life Leech - Elemental Proliferation

Items

Instead of Rare boots we use The Blood Dance. Instead of Voll's Devotion a normal rare amulet. All other items are identical.

Flasks: Instead of a Surgeon's Ruby of Warding we use a Surgeon's Granite of Warding or of Iron Skin. If you choose the Iron Skin version, you have to get "of Warding" on your Topaz Flask. On our second Divine Life flask we use "Of Staunching" to remove bleeding.


Reflect

This version is also safe against reflect. Normal and double reflect are no problem. Still, since you do not run a Sapphire flask, i'd probably avoid -max resist maps.



Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in this thread or PM me in the forum. By time i'll add a Q&A section. I'm not a native english speaker, so mistakes are likely to be made.

Kind Regards,

Lethmyr
Reserved
have you ever thought about using blood dance boots?
"
have you ever thought about using blood dance boots?


Well, if you read the budget version you'd know. Yes I did.
Im not using them in my normal setup because frenzy charges would shatter mobs on crit, thus preventing my ignite from my endurance charges to proliferate.
How about using scold's bridle to proc icespears+(pcoc?) linked to cwdt to have auto-charge generation?
"
octopussball wrote:
How about using scold's bridle to proc icespears+(pcoc?) linked to cwdt to have auto-charge generation?


With the perma IC setup, you're immune to scold's damage.

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