[3.0] Wilson's Thirst - Storm Call, Kitava's Thirst, VP, MOM, Berserker (Cheap and Easy)

This build uses Storm Call to proc four spells socketed in Kitava's Thirst which has a 30% chance to cast those spells every time a spell is cast costing 100 or more mana. Using the Berserker Ascendancy we gain more damage for our storm call and Kitava cast spells. We also gain leech which is made instant by the Vaal Pact node. We use Mind Over Matter and a Pledge of Hands to gain extra mana to cast our spells and provide significantly more effect HP.

Very Basic T8 Atoll Map Run:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HbiW3ye_j8

Basic T10 Shaped Mesa Map Run:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs-x9snXDgI

T11 Chateau Map Run (lucky Crit Shrine for boss)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aju-DN5hjBI

More videos eventually.

Yes, Dark Pact Bersker is quite a bit better and I don't really expect this build, due to its realtively low EHP, to be able to do much beyond a couple of the guardians eventually, but its still fun to play and visually appealing. You get to show off multiple MTX, as well as mix and match what spells you want to spew in all directions. Its mostly a map clearing build and can be done on a budget. I play this in SC so I get to enjoy some fun close calls and some frustrating (fairly rare) deaths.

Pros:


* Is not DP Berserker and therefore isn't boring and visually unappealing to play.

* Is very visually appealing to play.

* You get to spew a ton of spells and show off your MTX bling.

* You help support the game by buying all the require MTX for the build. This also makes Chris Wilson happy.

* Is fairly cheap and doesn't require anything more than a four link to get the build going.

* Most of the unqiues used are trash-bin uniques you can pick easily for next to nothing.

* Can tank most bosses with most map mods (probably, I'm still testing different mods).

* Allows for a lot of flexibility in regard to what spells you use both to proc Kitava's Thirst and what spells are cast by it.

Cons:

* Is not DP Bersker, and doesn't have nearly the same damage.

* Can be laggy because of the number of spells going off.

* Is fairly slow compared to meta builds in terms of clear speed.

* Uses Lightning Warp to get around.

* Requires you to spend a lot of money on MTXs.

* Has trouble with Elemental Weakness unless you have some fairly decent gear.

* You will likely die to some BS at some point (probably a Volatile you won't see because of the spell spam will get you). Harbingers, because of randomness of the mobs and spells they cast (and the spells you cast) can hide some BS that will instagib you. Bosses with damage mods can also one shot you if you're not careful.

Current Pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/fTARgm9e

(to view this use the Path of Building program and import it)

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/3.0.1/AAAABAECAAQHBUIHYwj0D6sPxBEtE3EUIBa_FukaOBzcIZAi9CQ3JIsmlScvKPoqOCycNZI64Tt8PC09Xz38PvFBckGHQZZFnUlPSi5Ms03jUEJQR1JTUzVTUlW1VcZYY1iuWfNepV8qXz9f0GHiZ5tqQ2wLbRlwUnKpfIN-WX_GgseDX4PMg9uFMonTjDaMz48aj0aQVZMnly2XlZhXmuCbUZ7Nn8uhL6KjplenCKcwp6Wsqq4-rrO3PriTuMq8mryqvOq-ir8IwQTDOsT2xq7G2Mu90B_Q9dWL2L3kUeaB6hDr5Ovu7w7v6_JF9kj4X_no_gr-jw==?accountName=BioSemantics&characterName=DarkBerserkerPact

Kitava's Thirst:



Mind Over Matter(MOM):



Vaal Pact:



Unwavering Stance:



Cast When Damage Taken:



Shock:

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Berserker

We take the Berserker Ascendancy for extra leech and extra damage.

Take these Notable passives in this order:

Pain Reaver (level 35 labyrinth)

Cloaked in Savagery (level 55 labyrinth)

Crave the Slaughter (level 68 labyrinth)

Aspect of Carnage (level 75 labyrinth)

You gain your Ascendancy by completing the in-game Labyrinth.

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/The_Lord%27s_Labyrinth

Helping Alira is probably best for more budget builds like mine as the Crit Multi and Resistances are quite nice.

Killing All the Bandits is fine too. Those two extra points will probably go into life at the end of your build.

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/The_Pantheon

Major God:

I took the Soul of Arakaali which helps to mitigate Damage of Over time. Without life regeneration, because of Vaal Pact, DoT can be very annoying.

Minor God:

The Soul of Yugul helps us mitigate reflect damage which can be a fairly large problem considering the large amount of elemental damage we do.

Storm Call



We use Storm Call because of its 0.5 base cast speed which allows us to spam the spell incredibly fast. It also does fairly decent single target damage and shocks enemies which in turn provides us more overall damage for our spells.

Other spells are possible, though its best to use spells with low base cast times like Storm Call, Blade Vortex, and Flame Surge.

In main two-handed weapon:

Storm Call - Less Duration - Lightning Penetration - Concentrated Effect - Increased Critical Strikes - Controlled Destruction

If not using a Pledge of Hands:

Storm Call - Less Duration - Spell Echo - Lightning Penetration - Concentrated Effect - Increased Critical Strikes/Controlled Destruction

The increased Critical Strike is preferable to Controlled Destruction because want to crit often so that we get large shocks which in turn increase the damage the rest of our spells do because shocked enemies take more damage based on the size of the shock up to 50% increased damage.

We use Less Duration because it shortens the time it takes for the lightning bolt to arrive after Storm Call is cast.

We use Lightning Penetration to help deal damage to harder targets like bosses and yellows.

Concentrated Effect is just a straight damage increase at the cost of some AoE, though with the number of spells being cast the loss of AoE is not significant.


In Kitava's Thirst:

This is up to your imagination. I picked:

Vortex - Freezes nearby enemies, leaves a DoT cold vortex that slows enemies.

Arc - Hits further away enemies, helps clear stragglers, high chance to shock.

Ice Nova - Freezes enemies in a wide circle for extra safety.

Firestorm - Helps clear stragglers, and increased overall effective AoE of the build.

Physical spells (Ethereal Knives, Bladefall, Blade Vortex) are possible options, but most physical spells are Dex gems which require lots of Dex to be able to get to a high level. It is relatively difficult to get lots of Dex on this build unless you optimize your gear. Physical spells also do not have much synergy with the Grand Spectrum jewels we use for this build but those can be substituted for spell dmg/spell crit/crit multi jewels if you are set on physical spells.

In Voidbringers (or gloves):

Lightning Warp - Less Duration - Faster Casting - Increased AoE/Concentrated Effect/Arcane Surge

For our fourth link, to get extra procs from our Kitava's Thirst as we move around, we want Lightning Warp to cost at least 100 mana. Arcane Surge and other 110% mana multiplier gems aren't enough with only Voidbringers, thus a Conc Effect or a Inc AoE (140% Multipliers) is necessary. If you choose to forgo this proc and use an Arcane surge, the Arcane surge will only last about 1.5 seconds or so because of the Less Duration (which is required to make Lightning Warp faster).

Chest:

I have two different setups in my chest:

Cast When Damage Taken - Temporal Chains - Immortal Call

I prefer a level 10 CWDT with a level 13 Temp Chains, ensuring it goes off fairly often, but not every time I am hit.

This blocks sudden physical damage.

Herald of Thunder - Curse on Hit - Assassin's Mark

Herald of Thunder provides us more spell damage, lightning bolts that can help pick off stragglers, and the ability cast the curse Assassin's Mark which helps use generate Power Charges (when we kill cursed enemies) and increased our changes to crit on cursed enemies.

Boots:

Cast When Damage Taken - Shock Nova (this can be any spell you want) - Lightning Golem - Molten Shell

We use a higher level Cast When Damage Taken for this setup so that our Lightning Golem is higher level, and so that the two spells we cast do enough damage to be worth leeching from. Basically, we take a large hit, the two spells cast (Shock Nova will cast and instantly leech from everything around you), Molten Shell will cast and then absorb subsequent physical damage as well as explode and allow us to leech more damage.

Pledge of Hands is a good and fairly cheap staff for the build as it increases your mana pool, boosts your spell damage (which effects all your spells, not just what is socketed in your Pledge), links your Storm Call to a level 30 Spell Echo (which boosts the mana cost of your main spell significantly, as well as saves you a link), and provides some block. A five-link is just fine for the build. The key point is that your spell costs at least 100 mana to use and helps provide extra damage.



Other possibilities include a crit spell dagger and shield (Storm Call would go in your chest in this case). This would allow you to shield charge which is quite nice. Its possible to get over 100 per cast on a four-link with storm call using Voidbringers and Fevered Mind.

A +2 Crit Spell Staff is also possible, and potentially even preferable depending on the rolls.

You can even do a Sire of Shards if you're using a different (projectile) spell to proc your Kitava's Thirst. If you're going to go this route, you will probably need to use a Fevered Mind to get your mana cost over 100 on a five-link. It helps if you choose Fireball, Ball Lightning, or Ice Spear which have higher mana costs at level 20 than other projectile spells. You would also want to fill your Kitava's Thirst with projectile spells such as Frostbolt, Ice Spear, Fireball, Ball Lightning, Magma Orb, or Spark.



For our helmet we obviously are using Kitava's Thirst (a very cheap item currently). The BIS is a corrupted version of Kitavan's Thirst that gives us "When Hit, (3 to 5)% of Damage is taken from Mana before Life" or a "30% reduced Storm Call Duration" enchantment you get from the Uber Endgame Lab. Increased AoE and Increased Damage for Storm Call are also good, and really any enchantment that boosts one of your spells is fine.



For our gloves we use Voidbringers (another cheap item) which increases our chance to Crit with our spells, it also increased our mana cost which helps use meet the 100 mana threshold for Kitava's Thirst. You can opt to put a CWDT in your Voidbringers for the extra +1 to elemental gems, but that would mean you would move your Lightning Warp to your Chest or your boots which are harder to color.



I think the Best In Slot here is a Belly of the Beast which offers us some Elemental Resistances, while significantly boosting our life and our overall EHP. The more HP we have the bigger hits we can take and live through. We leech life more than enough to survive lots of small hits, but we are generally weak to very large hits.

Another possibility is a Koam's Heart (though the loss of sockets is problematic).

I also used a five-linked Atziri's Splendor for a time with this build. It gives you a significant amount of HP, and lots of Elemental Resistances. It also gives a lot of Life and Mana on kill, as well as is very easy to roll the colors you want. All in in all its a cheaper option than Belly of the Beast, and is almost as good.



We use a lot of uniques in the build, and don't pick up much resistances on our tree, so we need to get our resistances where we can. A pair of Two-Toned boots with lots of resistances, life, and if you can afford it, movement speed, are ideal for this slot.



A Rumi's Concoction gives you some extra Block to help mitigate the stickier situations.



A Diamond flask is an essential item as it makes our Crit lucky (and therefore effectively increases our crits). Its best to roll this to prevent Freezes so that before you open a strongbox or engage with a cold damage-based boss, you can preempt any possibility of being frozen.



An Atziri's Promise is a cheap flask that increases our damage and increases our leeched damage.



A Zerphi's Last Breath allows us to gain life at 800% the mana cost of the spells we cast over the course of 10 seconds or until we hit full mana. Currently our Storm Call costs about 155 mana, which means Zerphi's Last Breath is healing us for around 1200 life per cast of Storm Call. This is pretty nice, but can only be used when we are at less than full mana. The ideal situation to use this flask is when we've taken a big hit or a series of hits and our mana pool is fairly low. This flask helps us get some of that mana back, while keeping us healed up.



A bleed flask is essential to almost any Life-based build. I prefer an instant flask for quick saves.

Other potential flask to use:



A Vinktar's Spell Flask is nice as it adds damage to your spells and gives you gobs of leech for a short time. However, the fact that it shocks you is a bit problematic. It seems to work best for against bosses rather than large packs.



A Doedre's Elixir generates charges, as well as allows us to proc a Savage Hit at will for our build. Doedre's Elixir forces us to take a hit for 10% of our life as chaos damage. Since we have relatively little chaos resistance this means we take substantially more damage than 10% of our life. A Savage hit is a hit that deals 15% or more of our. For the Berserker the Cloaked in Savagery node allows us to leech 100% of our damage if we've taken a savage hit reccently, as well as boosts our damage. Thus by hitting Doedre's Elixir we take a Savage hit and leech 100% of our damage for four seconds. Using this flask requires some knowledge about when the leech is need and when its safe to take that Savage Hit. Using it on something other than full life in the middle of a fit can be problematic as you can hasten your own death, but using right before a fight as you begin to leech can mean you are fairly safe for four seconds.



Its possible to a Choir of the Storm amulet here but generally a Crit amult with life is probably the best option.



Basic crit ring, the more life and resistances the better.



I opted for a pure life/resistance ring to help with Elemental Weakness maps.



More Life and resistances.

Our Jewels:





I use three Grand Spectrum Viridian Jewels for increased elemental damage. These are fairly expensive, so really any spell damage/spell critical chance/spell critical multiplier/staff block jewels can work here. The nice thing about the Grand Spectrum Jewels is that its fairly large damage increase for all my spells all the time rather than just when I crit. They provide a smoother, more consistent experience.



You should definitely get at least one jewel with protection against silence, whatever other stats it has are just gravy for the build. Silence prevents us from casting spells which in turn prevents us from leeching which is what keeps us alive.

You must have an MTX for for every spell you use. Naked spells do no damage and can't crit.

>.>

No, I'm not Wilson, the only Wilson relevant to Path of Exile is Chris Wilson, the Lead Developer. What he is thirsty for is for you to buy lots of MTX.