[1.3] [Torment] Unbridled (4xCWDT pawnage)

Scold's Bridle is an incredibly powerful unique. Not only does it give a massive boost to spell damage but its self damaging procedure can be abused to rapidly activate CWDT and molten shell. This can be maximized by equipping as many CWDT as possible. As this item is torment only, that pretty much makes this build torment only unless you get lucky using zana's torment mod.

So what you may say, CWDT linked to damage skills are weak. But that is not entirely true. Your passive damage output from CWDT can be quite good in fact when combined with dual heralds(ice/thunder). In addition, we can harness the power of Voll's Protector so each of those spells will have the potential to generate power charges, a valuable resource, which also has incredible synergy with a CWDT linked discharge.

Staying alive can be a challenge if your passives are invested into high crit and your skills are dealing damage to you. But luckily there is a cheap unique which seems perfectly fitted for the job, Cybil's Paw. Vaal pact is also an awesome choice if you have some of the more top end atziri gear that grants elemental leech such as a catalyst or belt. An extremely lucky Vaal Orb can also grant elemental leech. As well as level 7 crafting.

3x instant life flasks are pretty much mandatory as your life will radically jump around.


The exact passive tree seems somewhat trivial in comparison to the correct choice of gear for the build.
Here is what im currently running which was initially planned for a templar wander, but with a few respec points works just fine(if a bit low on life):


For those that have the gear to go with Vaal Pact, something like this witch should do just fine:


Recently i have respeced my templar to grab Vaal Pact. The difference is slight under most circumstances, but occasionally it becomes crucial.


Note that armor does indeed reduce the damage taken from Scolds, and thus reduces the rate at which your CWDT fire. A level 1 CWDT requires 440 damage to trigger, which means every 110 mana you use will fire your payload. Id recommend you plan and test things carefully for the bare minimum of mana in order to unload every cast(110) or every other cast(55). Note that these figures are with 0 armor. Roughly every 12 points of armor will mitigate 1 point of damage, which comes out to 1 mana per 48 armor.

Blood magic support is especially nice to use with your primary activator, as higher levels of the gem will reduce its cost allowing you to optimize. In addition saving passives/ mana regen items/ clarity and allowing you to completely forget about all need of mana.

Currently i use Lightning tendrils as my primary skill and is supported in such a way to trigger all my CWDT with each cast. It blows through mid level maps quite well. But any skill will do just fine. A fast attacking attack, incinerate, or flame blast will net you the greatest DPS(im guessing it would rival the output of any but the most insane Mjolner CoC builds). But at the cost of extreme damage taken per second.

The builds primary weakness is lightning thorns. When you damage an enemy 16+ times a second, thorns utterly destroys you. For this reason i would recommend running Purity of Lightning, equipping a Surgeon's Topaz Flask, and being very very cautious any place that includes arc mages. Additional precautions include getting the +1 maximum lightning resist node in the mage ES cluster and getting some decent vaaled items with +1 all maximum resists.

Optimal spells to link with CWDT are those that hit multiple times: lightning orb, spark, glacial cascade, firestorm. The reasoning is that your heralds are doing the majority of the damage, also it synergizes very well with cybils. Note that lightning tendrils is considered a 'channeled' spell even though it is not listed and thus cannot be triggered. Added lightning(especially quality), chaos, and cold are all very good when linked with these spells at level 31, but not so much with other spells that only hit once. Link space is really your biggest challenge.

The build requires both herald of thunder and herald of ice. Additional auras are of course a personal choice. An ES variant would absolutely run discipline.


So the core of the build is really the items:

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Bought the cheapest Doryani's Invitation i could find today. Lost quite a few hps out of the deal but i think the lightning leech is worth it.


A pair of Voidbringers dropped for me yesterday. The extra mana cost can actually be a good thing for this build, and the crit chance is sooo good. Not at all required, perhaps not even desirable depending on how you link your primary skill and if you need additional life/resists.


Blood dance are really nice for discharging. Its lack of life and resists really hurt, but i think its worth it. This is softcore afterall.

Any of the charge gaining curses are awesome for this build. Warlord's Mark seems to be wickedly powerful, but Assassin's Mark is also very strong.

Uploaded some game footage(without commentary) in level 67 library. Maps go pretty much the same, one click and the screen is dead. You just have to watch out for dense ele reflect packs and arc mages.
http://youtu.be/Y2QNZwDnVcg

Here is another video where i dont actually use any skills:
http://youtu.be/1-zPZOTKdh0

I don't play in Torment league, but I'm very curious of how this build works. Sounds very fun and If possible, can you upload a video of the gameplay?

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darkerebus wrote:

I don't play in Torment league, but I'm very curious of how this build works. Sounds very fun and If possible, can you upload a video of the gameplay?

It works very well. Iv uploaded a library clear for you. Nothing special about how its played, just click once and watch everything explode.

Few ideas cause i'm playing similar build.

Blood magic is more efficient at level 1 in this build.

I don't think wasting a 5l for the main attack is worth it. I use cyclone + curse on hit on a 4 link to get high level curse on only a 4link (+life gain on hit too).

The reason to take spell that hit multiple times are not the heralds but cybil's. Damage effectiveness makes heralds do around the same boost to all spells.

Blood dance seems to me like the weakest unique in the build and you need life. Yes it is softcore but with a similar build i totally die too much because:
- your life gets up and down due to the build
- you can get one shot when you're already lowish, it's way easier to get one shot when you regularly go to 60%hp.
- you can't really stay far, only way to get the spells to hit is to pick aoe ones and stay close to mobs
At the end you still want to level, so dying is also an issue.

You don't really need catalyst to go vaal pact, warlord marks works well.

I thought about cybil but it seems to lack damage to me. I'll give it a try. I think cybil + spell damage/spell crit shield might be better though than double cybil. That way you use the 6%/5% block chance.

Armor is not really bad imho. It makes mobs hits softer and there are plenty of ways to hit yourself pretty hard, especially with blood magic.

For pots i like having a atziri's promise. The leech is pretty decent.

Last thing, you should replace your searing totem by vaal molten shell. It's huge in this build, totally nukes bosses (well i cyclone but you can probably proc it very fast too with tendrils as i suppose it procs on CWDT linked spells too).

I run a very similar build, based off alkkine's reddit post. Will update with gear in a bit, I use romiras to build power charges via incinerate, which frees up the chest slot (CoD is perfect for this build as mind over matter damage to mana still activates cwdt). And you definitely want vaal molten, it annihilates bosses, but make sure you have unwavering stance because casting it can cancel the skill if you get stunned

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Squirrel_of_doom wrote:

Few ideas cause i'm playing similar build.

Blood magic is more efficient at level 1 in this build.

I don't think wasting a 5l for the main attack is worth it. I use cyclone + curse on hit on a 4 link to get high level curse on only a 4link (+life gain on hit too).

The reason to take spell that hit multiple times are not the heralds but cybil's. Damage effectiveness makes heralds do around the same boost to all spells.

Blood dance seems to me like the weakest unique in the build and you need life. Yes it is softcore but with a similar build i totally die too much because:
- your life gets up and down due to the build
- you can get one shot when you're already lowish, it's way easier to get one shot when you regularly go to 60%hp.
- you can't really stay far, only way to get the spells to hit is to pick aoe ones and stay close to mobs
At the end you still want to level, so dying is also an issue.

You don't really need catalyst to go vaal pact, warlord marks works well.

I thought about cybil but it seems to lack damage to me. I'll give it a try. I think cybil + spell damage/spell crit shield might be better though than double cybil. That way you use the 6%/5% block chance.

Armor is not really bad imho. It makes mobs hits softer and there are plenty of ways to hit yourself pretty hard, especially with blood magic.

For pots i like having a atziri's promise. The leech is pretty decent.

Last thing, you should replace your searing totem by vaal molten shell. It's huge in this build, totally nukes bosses (well i cyclone but you can probably proc it very fast too with tendrils as i suppose it procs on CWDT linked spells too).

I agree with everything youve said(except heralds not benefiting multiple hit spells more). In fact iv already swapped my totem for a vaal molten and switched my primary activator into my gloves. I was using the totem to thin down ele reflect packs.

As for blood magic, i have 4 different gems at different levels. In my current set up i can use the highest level one and still unleash my payload every activation.

There are many ways to build a CWDT bridle. What iv shown is only a poor templars budget version whom was lucky enough to get a voidbringer drop. If i had the resources for a vaaled apep's with ele leech, it would be near ideal. I think it goes without saying that if you have access to better gear then by all means use it.

I cant stand all these pointless build threads that include ridiculous requirements of 6link shavs wrappings/ mjolner/ 500 dps weapon/ etc. There should be a separate forum for such things.

I think a harvest beats a dual apeps.
6% leech, up to 300% crit, free surgeon and 1 less CWDT needed.
I'm saving scours to zana craft it, but man i'm at 80ish, won't go far with that.

You unload all except the high level discharge right?
Don't you mix it with the small one in the boots?
Because if you manage to unload a lvl 18 CWDT every cast (2790 dmg) i must be doing something wrong.

For the shavs and such I don't mind. Usually you can adapt good build to a cheaper less efficient version. If you can't the build is usually bad.
And for 90% of the build you can stick in shav, 10 auras for better efficiency...

Hopefully for us, this is one of the few build who's better with 2 auras than 10 because we need the slots for more CWDT.

I'm using a shield + doryani's (maybe apep's later, possibly void battery endgame). Harvest will be next to impossible to obtain in torment, same for devotion. +1 frenzy blood dance, however, are a few exalts and definitely obtainable. I usually find <10 ex worth of gear in a league so my builds stay fairly budgeted. So yeah, void battery is pretty unlikely, I can dream though

Edit: here is my gear


I don't have unwavering stance yet, so I have to pop a granite flask before VMS for it to go off (still doesn't in vuln maps). My yellows are pretty meh overall, cloak of defiance and +1 frenzy blood dance are the next upgrades I think, dunno how I feel about apep's just yet, and I haven't really done the math on if I'm using the right skills/if nova is worth socketing vs. a support gem/if levels are correct on cwdt/etc, but its working as is right now, can probably optimize a lot actually.

I fail to see why void battery would be better. Doesn't seems to be so much stronger dpswise unless maybe if you dual wield them. And you loose 1% ele leech (so much better than single element leech) and a free ele prolif.

For harvest i'm not sure about its rarity, but my guess that in average it would be cheaper than a void battery. With current exilebro rates, 500 chances and 500 scours are just a bit over 10ex. Although it might be above average if harvest is supposed to be very rare.

Void battery gives +1 power charge which is enormous damage-wise, its absolutely BiS for damage, at least for what I'm trying to do. The leech isn't terribly relevant for me since I'm already socketing it all over the place, but I kinda like how harvest could eliminate the need for leech gems altogether, though I'd miss the life/resists on a shield which I'm currently leaning on.