[1.1.5] Smo's Dual Cybil's Paw EB/Mom/AA Ball Lightning

I intend to use this build in the next four month HC league, so it's designed to be reasonably tanky. I'm currently testing it to replace my trusty snapshot minion build that has carried me through the last three 4-month leagues. The goal is to make a build that is cheap to put together and capable of maps with a reasonable clear speed. These two traits are vital for my first char of the league while I wait for the market to become populated. Having a solid farming build also gives me gear and currency for building other characters.

During invasion I tried several scion EB/Mom/AA builds. The tree is relatively straight forward and extremely tanky even with crap gear. The major downside is only have 20-30 points to spend on damage from the skill tree. The last build I tried was a crit glacial cascade character using a 5-link carcass. It was fun, but EXTREMELY slow in maps and really expensive to build. But, I really considered the char for BL as it was 700% increased crit and 80% IAOE which seemed very effective on paper. I decided against it as the currency cost to buy the required gear (Carcass and Divinarus) was too much for a new league char. In the end I decided on the trusty EB/Mom/AA tree and dual Cybil's Paw (cheap!) for the LGOH (insta-leech).

Ball lightning's most interesting feature is the mechanic it uses to deal damage. A projectile that does damage over an AOE at a constantly fast rate, 5 times per second. The only limitation to this hit mechanic is that it's per cast, so LMP/GMP don't shotgun. There are several interesting mechanics to exploit:

1) The 5 HZ hit rate: anything that goes well with frequent hits works really well. This would be things like blind, chance to flee, culling strike, and life gain on hit from Cybil's Paw. Combine this with a reasonable damage effectiveness of 30% and added damage supports are also appealing.

2) Damage covers an AOE: Kill 50 guys as fast as 1 guy, because it hits everything in the AOE 5 times a second. Increased AOE increases the number of mobs hit, but concentrated effect and increased area damage do not have an effect on damage output.

3) Damage is delivered by a projectile: This allows for slower projectiles to cause the ball to linger. Combining this with increased AOE and fast cast speed allows for multiple balls to hit the same target, effectively shotgunning. More on this later. Also, projectile damage applies to the spell damage.

I took all three passive points from bandits.

Currently Playing at Lvl 73

The first and foremost selection in this build is Cybil's Paw, which I dual wield. It's relatively common and reasonably cheap for early league.
The mods on Cybil's DO stack, so I get twice the life leach and damage from block.

With the 11 instant life per hit I get, that works out to:

1 mob = 55 life per second
5 mobs = 275 life per second
20 mobs = 1100 life per second

Pretty impressive I think! In the video's you'll notice I almost never leave full health as long as I'm casting.

Concerning the spell damage from block, dual-wielding gives 15% block and I spend 9 passive point to get an additional 20% block from dual wielding, for a total of 35% block and 84% increased spell damage. An interesting thing to note on Cybil's is that the spell damage mod works EXACTLY as described in that you don't get spell damage for the remainder of block after dividing by 5, ie. 39% block gives the same spell damage as 35% block.

The remaining mods go well with this build as cast speed is great for BL and mana is great for MoM and AA.


And that's pretty much it for specific gear! The rest of my build is whatever junk I had laying around selected based on priority (most to least):

1) 5-Linked Chest, pretty much required but any ES or hybrid ES chest should work. An ES chest will be easiest to chrome.
2) +Life
3) +Resists (till capped)
4) +Mana or Mana Regen
5) +Cast Speed

For auras, I only run Discipline and Clarity on reduced mana.

For phys damage mitgation I have standard CWDT+End Cry+IC+ID setup.

Movement skill is reduced duration + faster casting + lightning warp.

For a little bit of DPS and culling rarity I have Spell Totem + BL + Culling + Rarity

The most effective way to scale damage from BL is to increase the number of balls hitting any one target. This can be accomplished by improving three aspects of it, increased cast speed, slower projectile speed, increased AOE. Balancing these three attributes so as to minimize diminishing returns dictated my choice of supports. After much testing, the links I found to be most effective at applying damage are:

BL + Echo + Slower Proj. + Added Chaos + Increased AOE

I use projectile weakness for cursing, as it is a 34% MORE damage mod that works for both the lightning damage and the chaos damage. Plus the knockback chance is just enough with BL.

Alch and Go Tunnel Map(69) with -max res

Calculating the effective "More Damage" Modifier from using increased area and slower projectiles is given by:

More Mod = (1 + IAOE) / (1 - Slower Projectiles)

For BL with Lvl 20 increased AOE (33%) and Lvl 20 Slower projectiles (44% reduced), that's 100% more damage.

I find the build fun to play and having passable DPS for basic mapping. Most notably, it's stupidly tanky and I feel around lvl 80ish a Dom farming version with rarity gear should be a non issue.

The biggest problem I find while playing with this build is single target damage, especially against resistant bosses. The culling totem helps a bit with extra DPS and the culling that last 10%, but having a proper nuke sure would be a boon.

https://poebuilder.com/character/AAAAAgAAW6_dDSzpFSAqTT8nSshaUqiam13yl0p9h3ZnoPzFOrOkOdCBR-Ii4u_jY3A0k7ZBTir56Bg8vSeTOghn6-4o-oLH0_xcsAlY26fBixjbhTJ08UCgIWB07XrvYEsFLVNSRZ2a4LiTpwgfAjbF2CR2EeTsMjQQWCycRKtVro-m37CCEEyzBAeX9FJTl5VtGT1fwFQI9LzqakMabJ2u42o26SSqFm86WFXGg9usmN2M2V_gEo0Zfq8RDxSwTC2CHtsLLX3BtO9QtYVG113GtQTkIouM4XPtIDwFn9_vfA==