Power/Endurance Searing Touch/Voll's Protector Discharge build, Need some advice/help

After the recent Discharge buff I've been wanting to play a discharge character, but haven't quite decided on a build yet and wanted to share my build idea for feedback and changes/tweaking.

Since Discharge is classified as Fire I thought it might be good using it with Searing Touch and Serpent Stance combined, and I just used Ghudda's build as a starting point.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1ecca7/critdischarge_build_post_108_patch/

This build is in no way optimized or properly tested, I just wanted some feedback from people interested in trying similar builds. I plan to play my discharger on softcore.

Here's the initial build idea:


The basic idea is to use Searing Touch for the fire damage boost, and Voll's Protector for the power charge on crit, and probably two enduring cries with faster casting to generate endurance charges. In combination with Searing Touch I figure taking the Serpent Stance nodes will make up for some crit loss as I won't be using dual daggers.

I will not be aiming for max power or endurance charges as I figure the combination is as effective, damage wise, as just maxing one of them and leaving the other at less charges. Since the power charges are mostly provided by the skill tree the extra endurance charges will come from helping oak in merciless and using 1 or 2 Kaom's Sign and switching them in and out whenever I need more resists/life etc.

Since power Charges cause Lightning damage and endurance cause Fire, I wanted to take Elemental Equilibrium and use some Ice spell, probably on a totem(perhaps ice nova+faster casting), causing the -50%resist to fire and lightning damage, and again making up damage for not maxing either charge type. Don't really know how to best accomplish this so suggestions are welcome.
(Using split arrow with life gain on hit, added cold and chain on weapon swap with Quill Rain might be worth it for large groups of champions etc, and also give an extra way of healing when needed.)

Also with regards to Lightning damage I added Static Blows almost as an afterthought since there will be plenty of Lightning damage and it is on the way to Serpent Stance anyway, and if the mobs are shock stacked the burn damage from the fire crits will hurt a lot more.
Don't know if this is actually an effective idea but I added it in as a possible option.

Beside the gearing the build really boils down to get some life nodes, get some charge nodes and as much crit nodes as is feasible and some key nodes such as EE and Serpent Stance.

The main drawback of the build for end game is probably that the concept is to gear dependent, as Voll's is probably not that great late game nor Kaom's Sign for that matter and this does decrease the overall defence of the character quite a bit I imagine.
I don't really have any map experience yet so I feel ill suited to make any predictions on the late game viability of this build idea.

So any comments, suggestions, criticism, discussions are all much appreciated as I really like the idea of this build but I don't quite know how to make it viable without spending to many points on the skill tree, and unsure of how to accomplish some of the game play ideas.

Here is my discharge build. You might find my gem linkings useful

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/386569

I made a discharge build befor the buff, and i made it use only fire damage. The perfect Searing Touch is how i made my way through the game. My advice is get a decent chest instead of volls, have 3 enduring crys while leveling, and dont waste points on serpent stance or static blows. start as a templar and make your way down the tree, getting fire damage, life and endurance charges. it worked fine befor the buff, so it should work great after.

There isn't really much synergy between Voll's and searing touch. If you're going to rock the Voll's you really want to crit cap yourself, so you can just spam discharge. The way to do that is to rock 2x divinarius (or rare daggers with lots of crit), combined of course with crit in the build.

Discharge has 8% base crit chance, so you need (95/8 - 1)*100% = 1088% increased crit chance in order to cap out, and thus be able to spam discharge, which is huge.

You can pretty easily get 400% crit from your spec. You get 350% from 7 power charges. That leaves 338% (or whatever your spec may vary a bit) to get from gear. Dual divinarius gives 240-280% or so. Hellbringer then caps you out. Depending on the quality of your hellbringer and dual divs you can free up a few crit nodes from your build, and call it good. You can use maligaro's instead of hellbringer if your spec is crit heavy enough, and your divs are good enough.

Hitting crit cap with searing touch, on the other hand, is pretty much impossible. And yes, it matters a lot. If you have 85% crit chance instead of 95% crit chance your discharge spam will stall out three times as often. You can start it back up again with an enduring cry, but that is both a nuisance, and an easy time to get your face smashed.

338% with searing touch isn't impossible. 120 from increased crit gem takes one divinarius out of the equation. Hell bringer makes up for another. There is still quite of bit of crit to be had on a rare amulet, so you can get pretty close to 338%. The extra could be picked of from critical weakness curse.

I'd prefer the 150% spell damage you could get from divinarius and a good spell shield over the increase from searing touch, especially with the increased defense of a shield.

From the responses here and on reddit I'm getting the impression that it is sort of possible doing something like what I propose but it will be very very difficult to gear for and it will probably also be more damage than is strictly needed.

I was not aware that it was that big of a difference with the crit chance though. I can see that just being able to keep spamming discharge using daggers is probably far more effective most of the time than the extra damage from the Searing Touch Voll's combination would provide.

And as another pointed out on reddit the bigger the setup time for my combo is the less efficient I'll be and this really all too true the more I think on it.

The most effective way I can think of for using EE is probably if focusing on fire damage through endurance and using Lightning warp with increase aoe to trigger EE with lightning to get the fire damage buff.

I am left with the impression that I really only have two choices;
Either max power charges and use Voll's and daggers(thanks for the divinarius tip btw) and keep some endurance charges on the side for when needed.
Or max endurance charges and use 2-3 enduring cries to keep the discharge going, and here I suppose I could use Searing touch as I won't need Voll's, or probably a good shield for more defence.

I suppose there is the third option for going for either a endurance/frenzy setup or power/frenzy setup using CI or shavronnes wrapping and get frenzy charges through blood rage. And in the case of endurance/frenzy using lightning warp to trigger EE for a boost on both fire and cold. However I imagine this is probably difficult as the frenzy and endurance charges are mostly far away from EE.
But how to make CI version of this build with frenzy charges I don't really know how go about doing as I don't really have enough experience with energy shield builds, but I imagine it would look very different from my proposals.

Thanks for the information and tips though, very helpful stuff :)

The best bet is to go CI, with Blood Rage whenever you kill a pack you'll get 3-4 Frenzy Charges (4 with Passive.) So at the very least you'll have a 3-4Frenzy Discharge ready for the next pack.

Most people I've seen use Warlord's Mark Curse, when you kill a mob you have a chance to get Endurance Charges, allowing for more Discharging/etc. Also WM makes Flasks refill faster, thus speeds up farming with constant Quicksilvers.

As for EE, I wouldn't recommend it.

Also of note, Discharge is a Softcore build, not really built for tankiness. Cold Snap with Ele Prolif/IncAoE is very useful on this build imo. Freezes whole mobs, allowing you to safely get into Discharge range. And can even be spammed by expending your Power Charges.

Divinarius is a great choice to get high crit, but your endgame weapon choice should probably be 1-2x Void Battery (Though they are mad expensive right now, hopefully they'll deflate :P)


Here's what I'd probably do for a CI Discharge on Templar, but I'd rather be Shadow (For aesthetic reasons :P)

I did a searing touch / endurance charge templar on hardcore. With a lot of success. The build is dirt cheap. Survivability is great. Forget about voll's its a bad idea to go for both charges as you'll lose too much survivability. You really need 84all res to play a discharge character or reflect will kill you every time you stop paying attention. I think your build will fail because of that (combined with the fact that voll's offers no survivability).

Here's my build : http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgUAAecCcQSzBS0FWxLhFCAUTRkuGYUaVRpsHRQkiySqJ-0pLilPLdI26DbpOtg8BT0PPfxG11BHUFBUSVcNWGNdxl8_YEtgbWEhZKN07XrvfLh8u331gpuDOITvhymLjIzPkc6YrZ2Ana6ezZ_fogCnMLUEud3E9sWKxtjSIdSP2WHd8-Nq5CLnUu8O73zwH_Iv8932SKcI2CQ2xR8CBAeXlVJTPV-X9I9G0NDPZVXGEmkXHHF5

This is what I'm aiming for around lvl90 : http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgUAAecCcQSzBS0FWxLhFCAUTRkuGYUaVRpsHRQkiySqJ-0pLilPLdI26DbpOtg8BT0PPfxG11BHUFBUSVcNWGNdxl8_YEtgbWEhZKN07XrvfLh8u331gpuDOITvhymLjIzPkc6YrZ2Ana6ezZ_fogCnMLUEud3E9sWKxtjSIdSP2WHd8-Nq5CLnUu8O73zwH_Iv8932SKcI2CQ2xR8CBAeXlVJTPV-X9I9G0NDPZVXGEmkXHHF5FHEGDmP9Ja0J9jbY8WzsVYgb74XsOBo4p4SQVcRYJ9U=

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shaar wrote:

I did a searing touch / endurance charge templar on hardcore. With a lot of success. The build is dirt cheap. Survivability is great. Forget about voll's its a bad idea to go for both charges as you'll lose too much survivability. You really need 84all res to play a discharge character or reflect will kill you every time you stop paying attention. I think your build will fail because of that (combined with the fact that voll's offers no survivability).

Well it depends on what op wants to do, and if he's playing Hardcore or Softcore. Personally I wouldn't recommend a Frenzy/Power Charge Glass Cannon build for Hardcore, ColdSnap can only help so much..

That Endurance/Tanky Mara build seems interesting, and even if it doesn't work out, can easily be respecc'd to a multitude of viable builds (RF+FP, RoA, EK, etc..)

Didn't know about void battery actually, have to look more into that, seems perfect for endgame weapons.

Probably should have made it clear that I don't mind having a class other than templar, I have way to many templars and marauders as it is, I just tend to start templars since the ele cleave levelling is so brokenly effective compared to most other things.

But I have been thinking that a shadow or duelist might be be better start for some sort of build going more towards the frenzy side of things. Duelist if doing endurance/frenzy and shadow for Power/Frenzy of course.

And when it comes to what I want I'm open to any suggestions as I think there are many interesting direction we can take a discharge build. Mostly I just wanted to get some discussions going to get e feel for the different options discharge offers.

Just turned 35 with the templar I started and have been testing out the whole power/endurance direction(more or less the same as the Ghudda build) for now since I have Voll's already but have yet to get my hands on a sering touch.

My initial feeling is that if i'm starting to level with discharge already at 35 I really should have the conduit gloves and a second party member doing the same thing, I can see that being very effective. Alone I often find myself starved for power charges no matter how I go about it, and mana as well since that -50% from Voll's is brutal.

I'm thinking a Searing touch Endurance/Power is probably the best solo levelling option as I would have complete control over my charge gain through 2-3 enduring cries, and the only thing costing much mana would be cursing and discharging as opposed to having to spam Spark/fork or Ice spears for power charges. Also getting 2 Kaom's Sign makes it easy to get 6-7 charges available very early for fast levelling I think, so yes the endurance charge version is probably the least expensive route.

For late game I could switch out Searing touch for something else as well. I also imagine a build mainly focused on Endurance charges is probably a better bet for late game survivability like Shaar mentioned.

Fortunately softcore is a bit more forgiving and one can die once in while without much problem, but it is not fun coming into merciless maps and not actually being able to progress any more from dying too much.

I think I'm leaning more and more towards continuing my Power/endurance Voll's with daggers for a while at least and try to get myself a Searing Touch and start a second character for Endurance/power :P

I also like the whole CI shadow frenzy charge idea as I haven't made a CI character yet, so that could be fun as well.

Btw sorry if it looks like I'm discussing with myself in my own post, it's just sort of how I process information and think up new ideas as I type :P
And apologies for any poor english grammar, it is not my native tongue and I tend to leave out the occasional "the", "it" and such when I type quickly.