[3.0] Kenzorz's Regen Focused MoM Storm Burst Inquisitor

I really enjoyed playing my Storm Burst character in Harbinger league and felt I had a good balance between defenses and offense so I decided to make a guide about it. :)

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Passive Tree
The passive tree to aim for

My passive tree at Lvl 95

Bandit Reward
Either Alira or Eramir is fine.

Leveling and Passive Tree Progress

Passive Tree Progress

This is just a general guideline for what you should aim for in your passive tree as you level, of course feel free to take any nearby jewel sockets or alternative routes whenever.

20 Points
40 Points
60 Points
80 Points
100 Points

Leveling
My honest advice when levelling is to simply not use Storm Burst at all until you’re level 68 to be able to equip Snakepit rings. Storm Burst is really painful to play before you can use GMP at the earliest.

I levelled my character using a Frostbolt setup with two Frozen Trail jewels until level 68 where I switched to Storm Burst.

Jewels

For jewels I have a total of 5 jewel sockets, what you want to look for are:

Jewel 1: A rare jewel with a total of 30%+ critical strike multiplier for lightning spells and about 7% projectile speed.

Jewel 2: A rare jewel with a total of 30%+ critical strike multiplier for lightning spells and about 7% projectile speed.

Jewel 3: A rare jewel with a total of 30%+ critical strike multiplier for lightning spells and about 7% projectile speed.

Jewel 4: This can be a rare jewel simply to fill in holes in your build. You could go for increased maximum life, elemental resists or spell damage.

Jewel 5: This can be a rare jewel simply to fill in holes in your build. You could go for increased maximum life, elemental resists or spell damage.

Pantheon

Major God: Soul of Solaris - Extremely useful since it completely eliminates the risk of taking multiple critical hits from enemies and you have a chance to take 1/2 damage from area attacks.

Minor God: Soul of Yugul - This is mandatory since it helps reduce reflect damage by 25% allowing me to survive reflect rares.

Alternative Vaal Pact version of the passive tree

Vaal Pact version

The VP version actually is less point starved since you don't need to worry about life regen at all and is possibly more damage too since for the Ascendancy you can skip the Consecrated Ground passives and go for the more elemental damage for enemies aura.

On the other hand, taking VP might require you to drop a Snakepit ring in favour of Berek's Grip although that's not necessarily a DPS loss considering the ring also gives added damage and you can take the more offensive Inquisitor passives.

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Gear

My Gear

Uniques to look for

Mandatory Uniques
Rings: 2x Snakepit. These rings give +1 projectile for spells and Storm Burst gains a lot of damage from multiple projectiles since it’s one of few skills where multiple projectiles from a single “cast” can hit the same target. The ring also gives cast speed which is nice.

Boots: Kaom’s Roots. These boots allow you to be immune to stun which Storm Burst would otherwise be susceptible to since it’s a channelled spell and the boots give a lot of life.

Recommended Uniques
Shield: The Unshattered Will. This shield is loaded defensively and is decent offensively. It gives life, all elemental resists, some channelled spell damage and most importantly a Harbinger minion which periodically grants you a buff that makes you stun and elemental ailments immune while also reducing your damage intake by 20% for 4 seconds, with an 8 second cooldown between its casts. The damage reduction buff also stacks with Fortify.

Body Armour: Carcass Jack. This is mainly for damage purposes. More AoE means more overlap between each Storm Burst explosion. It also gives a decent amount of Area Damage.

Rare Gear to look for

Weapon: Spell damage, Critical Strike Chance for Spells, Cold Damage Added to Spells, Critical Strike Multiplier.

Helmet: Life and resists.

Gloves: Life and resists.

Belt: Life and resists.

Amulet: Life, Critical Strike Multiplier, Mana Regeneration.

Cheap Alternative Gear

My gear is all luxury gear and is not the requirement to get this build going. In this section I will give suggestions on how to gear at a cheaper cost until you can farm up currency.

Weapon: Any wand with spell damage, cold damage added to spells, critical strike chance and critical strike multiplier. Wands tend to be much cheaper than daggers with the same stats since they lack a good mobility skill like Whirling Blade (Lightning Warp is much slower and can’t be supported by Fortify).

Shield: Dual wield wands, although The Unshattered Will is ridiculously cheap on Harbinger at the moment.

Body Armour: Tabula Rasa. I used this until around Lvl 90 where I had enough to buy my 6L Carcass Jack.

Helmet: Any rare helmet with life and resists without the helmet enchantment.

Gloves: Any rare gloves with life and resists without the glove enchantment.

Boots: A low roll Kaom’s Roots without the boots enchantment. Kaom’s Roots with low life rolls cost as little as 1 alch.

Amulet: Just worry about Life and Critical Strike Multiplier for now.

Enchantments to look for

Helmet: 12% Increased Storm Burst Area of Effect or 150% increased Effect of the Buff granted by your Stone Golems.
Taking the Storm Burst AoE enchant would give you more overlap between explosions whereas taking the Stone Golem enchant would increase your life regeneration by a lot.

Gloves: Commandment of Winter
Extremely important enchantment to take, it adds a ton of damage to your kit and synergises well with spell crit builds in general and even better with this build since it benefits from Snakepit's additional projectiles.

Boots: Regenerate 2% of Life and Mana per second if you were Hit Recently
Extremely helpful defensively for obvious reasons.

Other uniques to consider

Choir of the Storm: This gives you increased critical strike chance and extra damage with the Lightning Bolt proc however you would lose life, mana regen and critical strike multiplier from a rare amulet.

Berek's Grip: Gives you life and mana leech at the cost of swapping out a Snakepit.

Atziri's Acuity: Amazing but requires you to swap a Snakepit ring for Berek's Grip.

Skyforth: Really good alternative for resisting stuns if you decide to go for a Vaal Pact build that does not care about the loss of life regen. Having a source of power charge generation also allows you to drop Orb of Storms power charge generating setup and you could use something like a Spell Totem setup with a high level Arcane Surge linked to it.

Incandescent Heart: A pretty straightforward up to 20% more damage multiplier giving you 20% of elemental damage as additional chaos damage.

Maligaro's Virtuosity: Good crit gloves if you can afford the loss in defenses.

Voidbringer: Good crit gloves if you can afford the loss in defenses.

Null and Void: Gloves with a good combination of offense and defense and you don't sacrifice life for it since it gives quite a bit too!

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Gems

Main Skill
Storm Burst – Greater Multiple Projectiles, Increased Critical Strikes, Added Cold Damage, Controlled Destruction, Added Lightning Damage

Mobility
Depending on whether you’re using a wand or dagger

Whirling Blades – Faster Attacks, Fortify
or
Lightning Warp – Faster Casting, Less Duration.

Auras and Heralds
Clarity
Herald of Ice

Utility
Orb of Storms – Power Charge on Critical Strikes, Increased Critical Strikes, Arcane Surge (Level 5)

Summon Stone Golem – Minion Life, Minion and Totem Elemental Resistances, Life Leech

Finished writing up the guide with whatever I could think of. Videos have also been added

I was really curious if you could finish the guardians .......

Have you thought about using the Choir of the Storm Lapis Amulet? What is your opinion ?

thank you

Nah I probably can't do Guardians. Vaal Pact is necessary to do Guardians for a build like this that gets up close often but I don't like using Vaal Pact.

Choir of the Storm is a good amulet for this build however I like the additional life and mana regen from a rare amulet. Choir of the Storm is also much more expensive than rare amulets.

added to the build guide listings.

some questions you may wish to consider answering for the guide:

How important / quality of life improvement does having 2 snakepits and a dying sun make the build feel? Would you consider the rings superior to well rolled opal rings?

You stated you don't care for vaal pact, yet this is a life build. Would you consider making a theoretical version of the tree with VP?

You added a lot of damage to your skill setup in links, but do you think these outperform 'more' multiplier support gems? Or is it for the impact that having higher cold and lightning damage gives to critical hits?

Many many people feel that storm burst is an unfun skill (myself not included), and i noticed you recommend 2 frozen trail jewels and frostbolt instead. How about cast while channeling with storm burst + frostbolt until you get all of your extra projectiles up?

Any thoughts on cute things such as an ES version, acuities, Tempest's binding, other AA expensive fun items? For those with the expanded budget. You mention recommended uniques, but if money was a non-issue, where would you take the build?

Cheers

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Kwitch wrote:

added to the build guide listings.

some questions you may wish to consider answering for the guide:

Thanks for adding my build to the guide listings! Good questions, I'll go through them and put my answers in the relevant sections in the guide too:

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Kwitch wrote:

How important / quality of life improvement does having 2 snakepits and a dying sun make the build feel? Would you consider the rings superior to well rolled opal rings?

Tbh I haven't done the maths for alternative rings but 2 Snakepits is a 1.3x damage increase for a Storm Burst build using GMP, not counting the cast speed bonus on the rings.

IMO Dying Sun isn't really necessary, it's simply a luxury item that just synergises well with Storm Burst since you get more damage from more projectiles and more AoE. Atziri's Promise might be a good flask to replace it with.

"

Kwitch wrote:

You stated you don't care for vaal pact, yet this is a life build. Would you consider making a theoretical version of the tree with VP?

Sure. The VP version actually is less point starved since you don't need to worry about life regen at all and is possibly more damage too since for the Ascendancy you can skip the Consecrated Ground passives and go for the more elemental damage for enemies aura.

VP version here

On the other hand, taking VP might require you to drop a Snakepit ring in favour of Berek's Grip although that's not necessarily a DPS loss considering the ring also gives added damage and you can take the more offensive Inquisitor passives.

"

Kwitch wrote:

You added a lot of damage to your skill setup in links, but do you think these outperform 'more' multiplier support gems? Or is it for the impact that having higher cold and lightning damage gives to critical hits?

The reason for the Added Light/Cold damage supports are:

1. Both Added Lightning and Added Cold deal 0.3x Storm Burst's damage each which is quite a lot.
2. There aren't other support gems that give more than a 1.3x damage increase besides Elemental Focus I don't think.
3. I don't want to use Elemental Focus because Added Cold Damage contributes a lot to my survival being able to freeze, chill and shatter things whereas Elemental Focus would prevent me from being able to cause elemental ailments.
4. Concentrated Effect while it is a big damage multiplier would severely reduce my projectile explosion overlap resulting in a loss in DPS which is counterproductive to why you would use this gem.

I have considered using Increased Area of Effect vs Added Lightning Damage however it's kinda hard to test not knowing the skill's base radius.

"

Kwitch wrote:

Many many people feel that storm burst is an unfun skill (myself not included), and i noticed you recommend 2 frozen trail jewels and frostbolt instead. How about cast while channeling with storm burst + frostbolt until you get all of your extra projectiles up?

I dislike using CwC with Storm Burst in general, it doesn't make sense to use it. Storm Burst is a skill where you maximise damage by continuously stopping your channel for the explosion and this in turn makes you get less CwC procs.

For instance, if you have a Lvl 20 CwC (meaning you cast your CwC spell every 0.35 secs), if you channel Storm Burst for 0.65 seconds and then stop channelling for the explosion you will get 1 proc of Frostbolt and then you will need to channel for an additional 0.35 seconds for another proc of Frostbolt, that's a total of 2 Frostbolt procs in 1 second (these timings are just an example).

On the other hand for a normal channelling spell like Scorching Ray where it's fine to continue channelling, you can get 2 CwC procs in 0.7 seconds.

I've tried using CwC and at most I would get 2 CwC procs before ending my channel and it really cuts into how many CwC procs you get over a longer period of time.

This brings me back to your original point about using CwC Frostbolt for leveling, it's probably more DPS to just level using a normal Spell Echo Frostbolt setup, things die fast before maps anyway.

"

Kwitch wrote:

Any thoughts on cute things such as an ES version, acuities, Tempest's binding, other AA expensive fun items? For those with the expanded budget. You mention recommended uniques, but if money was a non-issue, where would you take the build?

I haven't considered an ES version since I'm not sure how low or high max ES values can get to now. It seems to have been nerfed across the board so I assume max ES values are close to max life values now.

Acuities would be BiS if you drop a Snakepit and use Berek's Grip.

Tempest's Binding is kinda redundant for this build considering I shock, freeze and chill most things already. Also you can only have one Harbinger out at once and I feel The Unshattered Will Harbinger is too good to pass up.

Skyforth's could be a decent alternative to Kaom's Roots if you're going for the VP version of the build. It would also open up more options since Orb of Storms PCoC will no longer be required so you could do something like put a high level Arcane Surge socketed to a Spell Totem setup.

I'm not sure there are any other expensive items besides these that would fit the build, everything is so cheap now lol.

I'm really interested in playing this build. What do you think needs to be changed/added for guardians and shaper viability?

"

l3sfin3st wrote:

I'm really interested in playing this build. What do you think needs to be changed/added for guardians and shaper viability?

Probably just going for the Vaal Pact variant, main problem I've found doing Guardians is that even with about 15% of my life regen per sec on consecrated ground it's not enough vs Guardian's spiky damage. I can survive hits but I can't sustain through them for long.

Hi, I have a question)
This build can solo farm uber lab?

Ascendancy order?