[3.7] Venasha, Meta Inoculator - Oldschool CI/ED/Contagion with Power Charges

This is more of a build showcase than a build guide. Look to Lahkesis for a sense of how Essence Drain builds typically work. Winds of Winter is a good example of a typical Void Battery build; priorities are to get a huge number of power charges to overcome the drawbacks of Void Battery. This build is somewhat unusual in that it only involves one Void Battery.

So, why? Well...

To tell the truth, I hate Essence Drain bow builds. Soul Strike is an amazing quiver, and I've done an Occultist Caustic Arrow build using it, but one of these days, the Hand of Chris Wilson is going to come down and smite us all into the ground for making staves look so useless. (Hint: add wizard focuses as off-hands for staves, equivalent to quivers.)

Also, I have this here completely unreasonably OP Timeless Jewel:



Which results in these defenses (at full Power Charges):



Here's the Path of Building: https://pastebin.com/xpTHP4yt

Note that PoB unfortunately can't handle Timeless Jewels or the Malevolence buff from the Watcher's Eye.

Highlights:

- 9 power charges. Inya's Epiphany, Aylardex, one Void Battery. I did try two Void Batteries, but after getting my hands on a really cheap vial to upgrade Apep's Supremacy, I found it hard to give up.
- Apep's Supremacy + CI = immune to bleed. We're not inflicting poisons, but it could be done with the Golden Rule unique jewel and the Coralito's Signature flask.
- PoB shows Essence Drain DPS at around 309k with all power charges and all flasks active. Vaal Blight is disabled; Wither is at 1 stack. (This is pretty typical of what you'd expect during actual clearing.) This is about half of the damage PoB calculates for 's CI variant under similar constraints. With two Void Batteries instead of one Void Battery + Apep's Supremacy, the tradeoff is about 50k more tooltip DPS in exchange for 1500 ES and 50% faster start of ES recharge. Not worth it, IMO.
- Not done growing. It's level 91, not all gems are even 20/20 yet, and there's still room for an Empower in there. I'm planning on getting another socket.
- Use of Flesh and Stone in Sand Stance. All casters should be doing this, as it's very cheap in terms of mana reserved. An easy way to get the equivalent of 50% chance to dodge melee attacks if you're not otherwise taking advantage of Blind.
- Yes, 10.3k ES in 3.7! The dream is not dead. For comparison, Lahkesis's CI build shows as being 8162 ES, and that's with a max-roll Vaal Regalia.

This was bankrolled by a Headhunter drop in the first week of the league. I got it out of a Singular Incubator, which is probably so astronomically improbable that it will never happen again before the heat death of the universe.