[3.17] Voltaxic Burst Frostblink BotB Trickster (15ex to make, 2mil Sirus DPS)



Have you ever wanted to play flicker but felt it was just a tad TOO fast? Do you hate left clicking to move? Do you really hate movement speed slows? Do you love explosions? Do you like reading rhetorical questions on a build guide? Well then this might be the build for you!

This build can technically do all content in the main game (idk about stuff like Aul) on a pretty tight budget but Sirus, Maven and Uber Elder are not comfortable. 2 mil DPS is pretty much the worst case scenario. If you have flasks up and Sigil up you can break 3 mil but it happens very rarely.

Note that I am by no means an expert and this POB is far from optimised, but what I have definitely works already. If you have any suggestions or questions please don't hesitate to ask! Note that this build really aims to minmax Frostblink ICDR over damage in a few places, so you can snag a quite a few more percents of damage if you decide to not make those tradeoffs.

TLDR
Build Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yAUmAaijnU

This build self casts Voltaxic Burst and almost exclusively uses Frostblink as its only form of mobility. To counteract the fact that Frostblink has a cooldown of around 2.6 seconds, we get as many sources of Increased Cooldown Recovery (abbreviated to ICDR from hereon in) as possible, which inevitably leads us towards combining power stacking, Badge of the Brotherhood, The Stampede, and an oxford comma. All this results in a Frostblink cooldown of 0.72 seconds when everything is perfectly rolled (not as hard as you may think!) which leads to comfortable mapping as long as there aren't any doors and fairly simple bossing up until you get to the big 3 of Sirus, Maven and Uber Elder (none of which are much fun for this build).

POB and Character Profile
https://pastebin.com/Dvzagt4t
https://poe.ninja/pob/3X4
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/crosshack/characters (WillTradeVBForCC)

Pros and Cons
Spoiler
+ You get to play Voltaxic Burst
+ Relatively cheap (my gear is less than 15ex)
+ Basically ignore all movement speed slows (Grasping vines...)
+ Capped evasion + Ghost Shrouds + CI is really good if you don't get hit often
+ Loads of leech because of Ghost Reaver
+ Built in explosions
+ High damage uptime against most bosses
+ Elemental ailment, Poison and Temp Chains immunity
+ Chris would be happy because this build has eldrich/exarch influenced, elderslayer influenced, synth rolled and fractured items...a little bit of everything
+ Can get more damage (~600k) if you sacrifice a little bit of Frostblink ICDR
+ You can use any spell with this core (I want to try Black Zenith Worb myself)
----------------
- You don't want to be moving since you lose a lot of DPS in doing so
- No ES recovery and very little regen
- You hate moving degens and 'shaper ball' mechanics
- No defense against big phys spell hits (only 29% spell suppression)
- Aren't really any super impactful flasks for you to use
- You have to self cleanse bleed/corrupting blood with a life flask (I know, yikes)


Gear
Spoiler

Uniques

Buy any non corrupted BotB and a bunch of divines (you should buy like 10-15 since you might need to divine other stuff, especially if you don't have harvest divines). Make sure you hit 10% ICDR of movement skills per Frenzy Charge. You don't care about the power charge stuff, but getting 20% chance to lose Frenzies is slightly nice qol in terms of keeping max frenzy charges more often (really only applies to bossing). You must anoint Overcharge since we are power charge stacking.

Don't divine this. Buy one that already has the max ICDR roll and save yourself some sanity. You can anoint Tranquility for ~8% more dmg and some ES at the cost of one tick of frostblink cooldown. It's probably worth it; I'm just too lazy to buy the golden oils.

You need 'chance to gain max frenzy charges every time you gain a frenzy charge` because the build struggles a little with generating frenzy charges. The other mods are basically down to budget.

Just two void batteries to stack power charges. Chuck a few divines if the numbers are bad, but there isn't any need to go overboard. Harvest enchant gives a tiny amount more damage.

Rares
The rares are far from perfect and were done on a budget. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement here (I detail things to go for later on in the guide).

This is going to be your biggest money sink unless you go for power charge rings or helms. The cheapest way is what I have currently; buy an ilvl 83 Zodiac Leather with frenzy charge on hit implicit and spam dense fossils until you are happy with the result. That part is cheap. Paying for fusings to 6 link is the expensive part. Ugh.

Buy any Hubris Circlet with this enchant (if you can't then inc. effectiveness of Assassin's Mark is only marginally worse), spam dense fossils and use Eldrich chaos orbs to reroll suffixes until you are happy. I used perfect fossils to get a bit more quality since I had a handful to spare, but that's up to you.

Just buy gloves with as much ES as you can find at your budget and reroll suffixes with eldrich chaos orbs until happy.

You have two options: Just buy a belt with the shaper tier mod and some ES (what I did) or if you already have a shaper crystal belt use dense fossils to get an ES roll (any ES roll) and an open suffix. Then craft the ICDR veiled mod before getting a harvest reforge more likely. It has a high chance of rolling the shaper mod over the veiled mod since the veiled mod can't roll.

You're just looking for attributes and resistances here. In my case I got the base for super cheap and got lucky with hitting attributes, but if you can't hit them here look for them on the gloves or helmet. The dex is more important than the strength (can just lower the levels of CWDT and immortal call a little)


Gems
Spoiler

Chest: Anomalous VB -> Power Charge on Crit -> Anomalous Spell Echo -> Inspiration -> Ice Bite -> Inc. Crit Damage
Anomalous VB gives more damage since we don't care about the duration and synergises with the enchant. Anomalous Spell echo is a little pricy so if you can't afford it just use a normal spell echo. Ice bite gives a lot of damage since you have so many frenzy charges and VB's effectiveness of added damage got buffed with the self-cast changes.

Main Hand: Vortex -> Arcane Surge (lvl 11) | Temporal Rift
Temporal rift is a really handy spell that does two things. It can be used in a pinch if you frostblink into a dead end (or take a wrong turn in delve), but it's also good if you have taken a hit to your ES and have nothing to leech off and need to refill your ES pronto. Temp chains immunity is also nice I guess. Make sure you set your Arcane Surge to the correct level to maintain 100% uptime.

Off Hand: Discipline | Assassin's Mark | Winter Orb
Assassin's Mark is really nice for caster builds now we don't have to recast it. It gives us more damage than other curses like conductivity since our build does cold, lightning and chaos damage, none of the curses will give us more damage across the board than just scaling crit. Winter orb is not necessary, I just use it to pre-stack frenzies before certain boss fights because of Trickster's Swift Killer ascendancy node.

Helmet: Purity of Elements | Portal | Sigil of Power | Grace
Purity of elements is here because my gear is scuffed and I'm somewhat lazy with my build. If you get res capped through better gear, you can change the charge mastery on the tree to give shock immunity at max power charges, finish the pantheon node that gives freeze immunity and then get ignite/chill immunity on flasks orsomething. That lets you use Zealotry instead which is 25% more damage.
Sigil of Power gives a lot more damage if you can keep the boss inside (e.g. Elder third phase, Searing exarch) so use it if you can.

Gloves: CWDT (lvl 11) -> Immortal call (lvl 2) -> Hydrosphere (lvl 1) -> Increased Duration (lvl 13)
You want CWDT, Immortal call and Increased duration as high as possible (gated by your strength) since you don't want a small hit to pop your IC. If you are struggling on strength you can have them lower. Hydrosphere is lvl 1 since you only use it for exposure and you want to keep its mana cost down (I keep forgetting to swap my lvl 5 one out for a fresh one)

Boots: Frostblink (lvl 21) -> Bonechill -> Increased Area of Effect -> Culling Strike/Empower
While I do have one or two other gems at lvl 21, Frostblink is the only one you kinda want at lvl 21 since it gives you +1 radius which will help you hit more mobs while mapping to get a faster reset on the next one. Empower can help you get to the next ICDR breakpoint if you aren't perfectly divined (or haven't taken Fleetfoot), so you can play around with getting a cheap corrupted one (don't shell out for a max level one, it's definitely not worth it). Culling strike is specifically required if you are bossing. Bonechill helps you do a little more cold damage (since VB gets it from ice bite).


Jewels
Spoiler


You have three options for Forbidden Flame/Flesh. Deadly Infusion is more damage (~1%) at the cost of losing a power charge (so one tick of CDR on frostblink) and being more expensive. Mistwalker is quite a lot less damage (18%) but gives on average an 18.5% chance to avoid all hits. This can be further increased if you weave in Withering step but that will reset your frostblink cooldown by around 0.85 seconds. It's also very cheap.

This last gem can be anything honestly. I just went for evasion cap and some phys as lightning. Against Sirus I recommend swapping this out for a corrupted blood immunity jewel (since evasion is useless against him) and removing grace for Zealotry.


Flasks
Spoiler



Not much to say about any of these except the first life flask. That's just there to deal with corrupted blood or bleeding and usually your leech is so high it's not super urgent for you to press it immediately. Bottled Faith would probably be pretty good but it's also expensive so yeah. There's probably a lot of optimising that can be done here.


Gear Improvements
Spoiler

Aside from the obvious issue that most of my gear has cruddy suffixes or prefixes, the main upgrades come in two forms: better frenzy charge generation and more max power charges.

For generating frenzy charges, you have 4 other options:
1. Farrul's Fur. It's pretty bad since it doesn't give nearly as much evasion and also costs a lot, so I wouldn't go for this option personally.
2. Double influenced chest. By woke orbing Redeemer Frenzy charge on hit with Shaper spell crit, you can get nice suffixes to lock and then reforge defense on. It also lets you use an ilvl 86 base letting you access higher tiers of evasion.
3. Frenzy charge gain on hit on the Precursor's Emblem. This is a restricted mod so any ring with this will cost $$$$$$, but then you have full flexibility on what to use in your chest slot.
4. Elegant Hubris. If you remove all nodes to the left of the power charge wheel on the tree and instead path down past Pain Attunement to the ES wheel near Scion, you can try to hit the three wheels near the jewel slot near Pain Attunement with Frenzy charge on hit. You will lose some damage but the upside is a free chest slot and the possibility to get Supreme Decadence which makes your life flask actually useful for a change.

For getting more power charges, you have 4 options, none of which are very realistic:
1. Warlord prefix on the helmet. The hard part about this is figuring out how to get enough ES on the remaining two prefixes...
2. Power charges on Precursor's Emblem. This is 60ex but note you'll lose the 'gain max frenzy' mod unless you use two Precursors, so you'll need to make up resistances and attributes elsewhere
3. Synth implicit on ring. That's 120ex.
4. Double corrupt your helm. This is terrible because instead of having nice eldrich implicits, you are stuck with (if you don't brick) terrible vaal mods unless you hit the power charge. The only other usable implicits are +2 Cold (for frostblink), +2 Aura, Increased ES and Increased effect of chill/shock (but note you only chill and shock for ~10% anyway).


FAQ
Spoiler

Why Trickster?
The other two options (since we are power stacking) were Assassin and Occultist. The Occultist misses out on a power charge since we can't use the new jewels to get an additional one (and the node we do want to get costs ~130ex, so yeah...). Additionally, going occy means you kinda want to use a Call of the Brotherhood to make better use of her ascendancy nodes and it gets a bit awkward to get full value out of them. I have seen another build using VB with Voltaxic Rift which then makes more sense for occultist. That being said, the inc aoe would be very welcome for sure, and a build going that route would probably be better off going armor/life or armor/es over evasion/es.

Assassin would be more damage and actually get more out of Badge of the Brotherhood since you can use the Elusive side of things as well, but you lose a lot of defenses in return and mana becomes an issue (since Weave the Arcane is a lot of our mana sustain at the moment).

How would levelling work?
It doesn't. I levelled with Lightning trap and respecced across at around yellow maps. That was a mistake. You'll only want to respec when you have all the uniques (divines don't have to be perfect), at least 8 power charges and enough ES to go CI straight off the bat. The main reason why is because this build only feels good when Frostblink is at a low cooldown, and if you don't have power charges the build is unplayable. If you are desperate you can farm sulphite on another character and spam delve with this one (that's what I ended up doing to get it to level 80).

What content does this build like to do?
Anything with high density. Breach, Harvest, Expedition (logbooks are amazing), Harbinger and Delve are all top tier atlas mods to go for. I've delved to 200 depth without any issues and do plan on pushing further at some point.

Bosses are easy as long as they don't have ways to degen you when you can't hit them. Basically it's just Maven, Uber Elder and Sirus that suck, but they're all still doable. Essences are not good because the really juiced ones will randomly oneshot you with a massive phys spell hit. I go into more detail on this in the notes section of my POB.

What's all this about ICDR breakpoints?
The game runs on 0.033 second ticks, so getting any additional ICDR means nothing unless it brings the cooldown under the next 0.033 second threshold. Every tick takes more ICDR to cross which is why you can actually drop a fair amount of ICDR for relatively little loss of cooldown and pick up more damage if you want. The best way to math this out is to go into POB -> Configuration and add `100% Increased cooldown Recovery of skills`, modifying the number to whatever you want and see how that affects Frostblink's cooldown (use 'Reduced' to go the other way). Currently, I'm 16% ICDR away from the next tick of cooldown and 2% over the last tick, so technically you can get the same cooldown on frostblink with a 78% ICDR pair of the Stampede, for example.

Is this build SSF Viable?
No, all the uniques are mandatory and not that easy to drop in an SSF environment (especially BOTB). It uses Forbidden Flame/Flesh and also requires a 1/30 divine on the Stampede.

Is this build Hardcore viable?
Yes, just not for long
Last edited by crosshack on Mar 12, 2022, 9:38:32 PM
Last bumped on May 14, 2022, 1:32:33 AM
still viable?
Nothing has changed since 3.17 so it's just as good now as it was then. I will hazard a guess and say that it can't do any of the uber content though.

The build is still very playable but I would suggest doing this as a second build since it is very awkward to play if you don't have all the required pieces yes (specifically the bits needed to bring down the frostblink cd)

It's also never going to compete with a meta build but it does provide a very unique playstyle.
Last edited by crosshack on May 14, 2022, 1:36:50 AM

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