1 week builds

skill tree

skill points/skill points/alira.

Links:
1. Storm call
2. Power charge on crit
3. Concentrated effect
4. Life Leech
5. Increased AoE / Elemental proliferation / Lightning penetration

If my party would have insane damage making my damage obscure or meaningless I'd swap out increased aoe for ele prolif. Lightning pen for boss areas. The idea is to support your party through blood rage + pcoc giving them perma frenzy/power charges. Additionally you will shock stack everything immediately and you'll be running dual curse (I managed to acquire the doedre ring for triple curse, the curses I had in my skill bar were ele weak/conductivity/crit weak/temp chains/enfeeble).

This build also has excellent solo potential: crit weakness + conductivity + ele weakness really skyrockets your damage combined with shock stacks. Going full solo also allows you to skip conduit which is another 5 points saved. Curse immune maps kind of mess you up though.

You won't be adding much to aura support, you'll only be running discipline + clarity. If you have even a little bit of mana/mana regen on gear you can run a 40% aura but I couldn't find any that was better than my current items.

Summary:

1. massive shock stacks
2. double curse
3. power and frenzy charges through conduit

If you want to play this build solo without conduit you should invest the points normally spent going towards conduit in going towards heartseeker (NOT throatseeker, that is actually a mistake even though it seems to be conveniently nearby and the better option).

The last points should be spent getting towards elemental dominion, extra power charge, 4% evasion per power charge, heartseeker and ondar's guille. Assuming level 100 you can get all these nodes but you need to refund 'deep thoughts' which is the mana node above the witch power charge. Eventually you'll need to run purity of lightning to mitigate reflect damage so you need to get your mana affairs in order when getting into lvl 90ish as your crit multiplier will start to build up then.

Kind of standard. Oak/skill points/alira.

skill tree

I had an Alpha's Howl and managed to get lvl 89 (could have gone 91 I think, played only for 5.5 days as my map group quit and I couldn't find a replacement). Wrath/Anger/Haste in Alpha's, Discipline/Clarity in normal links. Maxed Arctic Armor (easy to sustain with full aura effect clarity).

This char was made in the domination softcore 1 week so I went with a tabula rasa for 6 links. You can substitute crit damage for item rarity if you want to go the mf route.

Links:
1. Power siphon
2. LMP
3. Chain
4. WED
5. Additional accuracy
6. Increased critical damage

I managed to solo poorjoy's asylum (entire party died to detonate dead on the boss so had to finish myself) and did 3 of the 4 olmec's sanctum bosses, also solo. Pretty good for a party char.

Pretty interesting build this was, basically you get all of the endurance charges which makes you enormously tanky and run flameblast off your health pool, this allows you to ignore mana modifiers and typically gives you more life than builds heavy on intelligence because strength gives flat life. Another bonus is that you can technically run all maps, even blood magic + no regen because you can take out the blood magic support gem in your flameblast on these maps and substitute it for a life leech gem. Only downside is that you kind of need a 5L but I always managed to get a 5L extremely easy in every 1 week race I've played so far (all through trading, didn't find any).

skill tree

Links:
1. Flameblast
2. Chance to ignite
3. Elemental Proliferation
4. Blood Magic
5. Iron Will

Oak/skill points/oak

You'll actually do quite a bit of damage with the iron will linked to it as the flameblast stages give you a lot of spell damage (110% more spell damage per stage). This really shines in a 6L with concentrated effect but I was unable to acquire one and didn't want to run with a tabula rasa as it was hardcore.

You will be running 4 auras: purity of fire, ice, lightning and vitality. I actually ran with purity of elements instead of vitality for a while as I really neglected resists on my items (i.e. I had 30 ms boots with life but zero resists). After I got some resistances I chrom'd my purity of elements socket to a red socket and ran vitality.

When I got my cold resist up I stopped running purity of ice + vitality and instead ran determination. Reason being that everybody and their mother run grace and I already had IR so I could go for the determination + grace + IR wombo combo. On some maps (i.e. half regen) I would still run vitality, it's easy to swap out because they're the same color sockets. When my reduced mana gem hit level 19 I could run tempest shield too (determ + temp shield + purity of fire + purity of light), tempest shield linked with 'blind', although it doesn't help me due to unwavering stance it's nice to blind a few mobs every now and then that you're tanking while channeling flameblast because it increases the survivability of your party who may dodge some additional hits. Only time I was close to dying was when I didn't have any endurance charges up and got smashed by merciless vaal. I did end up tanking maze vaal later in the game with monster damage mod and vulnerability + boss mod colonnade (carnage), there's a lot you can do with 7 endurance charges and grace + determination + IR physically, elementally you're also pretty tanky due to purity's +max resist and elemental adaptation giving +2 max resist. On top of this you have the reduced crit multiplier.

You can refund 'diamond skin' if you have enough resists but I kept it for elemental weakness maps. Things to look for on gear is fire damage, fire damage, fire damage, fire damage and life + defenses (ev/arm) as you can make up for resists with auras so you only need a little bit.