Ascendancy makes dreams come true: Wildstrike inquisitor

As a pseudo-aoe, pseudo-melee skill with build-in RNG wildstrike {WS} is certainly amusing to play with, but really hard to build around. Whatever you do with it most certainly is done better with something else. Here I show my take on making WS work, and certainly kick some ass.

These words are written by a softcore scrub and this build isn't hardcore-viable, mostly because it's melee that suffers greatly from reflect and doesn't run vaal pact so no amount of defensive mechanics can help against random assplosions.

I'm not native English speaker so this text might be slightly hard to read, apologies.

WS is a melee skill that isn't melee. Meaning secondary explosion doesn't scale with "melee damage" nodes at all. Thankfully in Str side of skilltree there are plenty of nodes that offer "physical damage with weapons".

WS also scales well with elemental damage but most elemdmg nodes in poe are crap compared to phys ones so better avoid 'em in this particular build unless you know what you're doing.

Why not cleave/earthquake/sunder/whatever if we go physical damage route? Answer is simple -- Inevitable Judgement ascendancy passive provides full elemental resistance ignoring on critical hit. This is huge and mostly abused in spellcaster builds *cough cough sparks cough*, but for WS it provides means necessary to being close to viable.

Basically without it to use elemental damage you needed a) Fire/light/cold penetration gem, b) one/two elemental weakness curses (flammability etc). Using inquisitor avoids both needs and lets you focus on damage gems and defensive part of the tree.

www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAUBAAHcApYEswUtB3ULYQxfE3EUIBZAFm8YXRo4HKcdFCFVJKonICcvKYss-zbpOtg8LT38QKBBckPIRY5Gt0d-Si5PBFBHU6VYY1iuWfNboF4TXqVfP2VNZlRmnmebaPJvO3IPdO1343fleHp5aHrvfA58u4NfhNmE74V9h2qKIozPj0aQVZJukweUb5tuogCnVaelqSepbqmUrfGuPq9suUO8VryavTa-p8AawGbApsEExFjFisauxtjJZ9J802_Vi9rB3D3jauRR7UTvDvAf9kj53frS-4s=?accountName=Bumc&characterName=Weird_strike

http://poedb.tw/us/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAUBAQHcApYEswUtB3ULYQxfE3EUIBZAFm8aOBynHRQhVSSqJyAnLymLLPs26TrYPC09_ECgQXJDyEWORrdHfkouTwRQR1OlWGNYrlnzW6BeE16lXz9lTWZUZp5nm2jybztyD3Ttd-N35Xh6eWh673wOfLuDX4TZhO-FfYdqiiKMz49GkFWSbpMHlG-bbqIAp1WnpaknqW6plK4-r2y5Q7xWvJq9Nr6nwBrAZsCmwQTEWMWKxq7G2Mln0nzTb9WL2sHcPeNq5FHtRO8O8B_2SPnd-tL7iw==

5.9k life, 28% block, 3k armour, 2k eva, 600 regen (~850 with conc ground)
Gear has trash bases at the moment (scraps from other chars), should be around 10k armour instead. Only notable piece is

Without it, life drops to 5100-5200 which lies within oneshot range of some tough bosses.

33k wild strike tooltip unbuffed, around 60k with all charges present. Don't trust tooltips, this damage is enough to one-crit whole white packs and 2-3 shot rares/rogues on up to T12 maps.
No flat damage/crit chance on rings/amulet, with right gear damage should be at least double the current amount.

Got this one as a drop, basically if you don't have Hegemony (or some GG gear lying around) then it's not worth going melee staff.

Again, melee physical is mostly useless (even though tooltip says against it), weapon elemental works fully (as 100% damage is converted to element(s)), weakest here is increased crit, missing one is life leech (faster attacks?).

Hatred gives most damage from what is available and I'm using blasphemy + assassin's mark for damage, even moar crit and power charge generation.

Mobility skill (leap slam-fortify-faster attacks and bloodrage (even though I don't get leech from it, damage boost outweighs losing ~250 hpregen) leave two 4-links for defensive setups.

Which ones exactly I'm currently undecided on, please leave your suggestions on what should this build use (immortal call/enduring cry?, Defensive curse on trigger? Golem? CwDT phase run?).

Recent buffs to melee mana costs allow minimal investment in mana regen and low-level clarity (or in my case, mini-clarity jewel) to never run out of mana. Hooray.

+ Decent damage potential, same skill used for single-target and AoE damage, main target takes roughly 2 times more damage (unconfirmed). With decent jewelry and Abyssius you can easily reach triple my dps without losing defensive stats.
+ Elemental crits freeze/burn/shock anything you fail to kill in one hit (mainly in parties)
+ Good defensive potential (in my variant it is 158% life from tree+jewels on lvl80, but if you want more, go and grab big life wheel for whooping 200+% life total).
+ EXPLOSIONS! (totally fine for GPU and eyes, unless you stack attack speed much more than I did)

- Melee. Taking everything to the chin is unhealthy, especially if you can snipe it from offscreen with most builds. No summons/totems to share your pain either.
- Reflect. One of the reasons I'm not going for huge dps, to really offset reflect on wildstrike you probably need to run triple purity or vaal pact, which defeats purpose of this build (better off just using something else.)
- Almost no pvp potential. While I'm two-shotting most players in arena with this champ, it's really easy to achieve on any melee char anyway and ranged/offscreen/trappers rule both arena and 1v1 pvp duels. Okay, nobody pvp's in poe anyway, but you get the idea.
- Wild strike itself. I'm sure ice crash would be better even with all work I put in to make the build work for WS.

Please submit your thoughts about this build stump, and have a nice day!