[1.3] Spider Charmer or Crit Pierce Self Cast Sparker (Updated March 2015)

- Synergy with Dart Art cluster for fast leap slam and high efficient cast speed bonus.
- Option to use Dory's Catalyst.

- Spider! Who doesn't love spider crawling around and tear your enemies to big piles of shocked pieces.
- Fun.
- Insta leech makes you persistent to ele reflect.
- Knockback from projectile weakness keeps enemies at bay.
- Quite high resistence and armour with flasks.
- High shotgun damamge.

- Buggy! If you cast your spark and dont realized that you are blocked with a door or a rock, there will be no spider > no leech > ded
- You gonna hate anything flies, namely skulls, freaking frogs and goats, animated weapons. You name it.
- Squishy. If you forget to flask up, you are a bug.
- Use multiple skills. You have to curse ball, flask, lightning warp, cast spark, run, loot, etc.
- Corrupted Blood. You cast so fast that you are going to have 20 charge of CB on you in a blink. This is however mitigated by your leech but still can bite you back if you don't dispell it after.

This build use the idea that spark can hit an enemy multiple times and thus priorities duration, pierce chance projectile speed and cast speed to maximize the chance of spark projectile hits.

Spark is one of the skills that benefit a lot from cast speed since the cast time is only 0.6 second compared to 0.8 second of arc, tendril and many other skills. This means investing in cast speed is a bit more efficient on spark according to the Cast Speed calculation.

The build aim to get (100% pierce chance)>70% pierce chance by either support gem or quality projectile weakness gem. Projectile weakness also multiplies your damage, making it very strong choice for spark. Projectile speed is achieved through dual wands, tree and faster projectile gems. NO LONGER NEEDED

Due to Spark's high cast speed and tendency to hit a target multiple times, Life leech and Vaal Pact is opted to get a very high leech rate (you leech from all 3 projectiles instead of 1 if you dont have VP). Another option would be Atziri's Acuity.

The build has decent crit chance and hit rate, thus making surgeon flasks a potent choice. With a good surgeon life flask and ruby flask, you can achieve 93% fire res and run RF on difficult bosses and still be able to sustain the burn.

EB is opted to fuel mana hungry Spark and get rid of ES so RF wont burn you too much. This also enable the use of high lvl AA.

AA is used but walking is limited since mana regen is only enough to cast spark. Lightning Warp is not too bad with half the duration nodes and it can be improved by movement speed to be efficient.. Leap slam is used as a movement skill in this build.

I ran the build as a shadow but then feel witch a better choice since you have option to have the 25% mana reg node.

Node that Buff Effect have a high effect on Heralds/Purity(1% more max res)/AA/RF so you will want that in the end.

My current tree with Atziri's Acuity (March 2015)


Tree used before Acuity

My current gear


Helm: a helm with res, good life and decent ES for EB. I recently messing around with a Leo crafted helm with high chance to avoid stun to deal with Atziri's Spear. I have two helm that can be swap to achive different curse if I am not using Windscream to dual curse.

Chest: a high ES is my choice in this case since it provides more mana => more mana reg and we dont have that much mana left for COD anyway. Coil is unusable since it does not have ES to feed us mana. I will test Lightning Coil when I arrive in Standard and acquire a high ES gear to drop the chest I am using. However, coloring Lightning Coil to a perfect setup will be almost impossibru.

Ammulet: Spell damage, Life, Crit Damage, Cast speed and Res is the combination you want to have. My ammy is a good example.

Boots: I opted for a pair of Windscream for the ability to dual curse and its usefull mods. It have the color to house my CwDT setup. I am also experimenting with Kaom's Root to achieve immuninity to stun or a pair of rare boots. Using either rare boots/Kaom's Root will require me to have 2 curse on hit setup.

Gloves: I have tried with Voidbringer to have a +1 for heralds and AA but I cant sustain the mana multiplier. I changed to a pair of Maligaro's and find it comparable to Voidbringer if you have a good crit multiplier pairs. I ripped my 35% pairs and have to buy a crap one :'(. A corrupted cast speed pairs would be BiS for damamge.

Updated! March 2015 I lucked out and got a pairs of Acuity. I am experimenting 1% life leech and Acuity to drop Vaal Pact and still have instant life leech. It also free up a slot in my chest for Faster Casting, which improve my tooltip by almost 10k with RF up.

Ring1: I originally thought that each time spark hit an enemy and dont crit it will generate a powercharge thanks to Romira's Banquet but it is not the case. The number of PC it generates is still very high tho and it actually gives me more damage than a 7% cast speed ring so I decided to keep it.
Updated

Ring 2: cast speed, mana reg, life and res is what you are looking for.

Belt: I would want a stun recovery belt with life and tri res + movement speed in this case but it is hard to come by these day.
Updated March 2015!

Sceptre: Almost identical to wands but enable the use of leap slam and vaal glacier hammer.

Alternatives


Flasks: This is a very important part of the build. You need a specific set of flasks to be able to out regen RF, dispel RF anytime at will and other stuffs. Hallowed life flasks is chosen for its recovery speed. Eternal Life Flask is a must to out regen RF burn and ofc Ruby + Granite. With my Granite Flask up, my armour shoot up from 376 to 10k and gives me 50% phys reduction.
Updated March 2015! Divination Distilate is used to get 100% fire res (and 101% lightning res with lvl 21 PoL) for uber fight.

- Spark: Pierce is not needed since the pierce chance from tree + projectile weakness is enough to achieve 100% pierce. The green slot can still be substitute for a pierce gem in case of curse immune maps. Link should be BBBRG and another B if you have a 6l.
For a 5L:
For a 6L:
Updated March 2015! Using fully blue chest with Spark - PCoC - Spell Echo - Faster Casting - Crit damage - Lightning Penetration for Atziri runs. Life leech is achieved from gears alone.

- CwDT: I tried to run around without it and it sucks. You want a CwDT lvl 3 setup to be able to blink in your enemies face and shotgun them to death.

Updated March 2015! Using self cast EC - IC setup for uber trio fight for 10s IC (using +1 endcharge belt).

- CoH setup: Ball lightning is a superior choice to Arc since it curse multiple enemies and goes further.

Updated March 2015! Now using single curse but 2 different setup:
Ball lightning - GMP - CoH - Prjectiles Weakness : to deal with trash mobs
EK - Faster Projectiles - CoH - Assasins Mark : to deal with boss

- Leap Slam: Leap Slam - Faster Attack .Using Leap Slam making the build much more mobile and it gets benefits from dual weild attack speed bonus.

Alternative


- Aura: We run 4 auras but only 3 of them is linked with Red. mana in gloves since we dont have enough slots for everything. Purity of Lightning can be swapped with Purity of fire in case of Reflect maps.

Updated March 2015! Altering auras for fight:
* HoT-PoF-PoL-Clarity for Vaal fight
* HoT-PoF-HoI-Clarity for other fights

- Ultilities: RF, AA and herald of thunders (or HoI) is placed on a wand

I chose Oak - Skill Point - Alira

You curse enemy with Ball Lightning and start releasing your spiders. Everything should explode and shatter in seconds, unless it is a goat or frog. In that case, back off and kite them or turn on RF to burn their asses.

Flasks should be kept in mind all the time and you should have a set of flask for specific bosses like Vaal, Dom and Merveil. Remember that when you dont have flask up, you are a bug and can be killed very quickly.

Updated March 2015! New videos with failed uber run coming soon!

This is recorded with my current gem setup which can be quite a bit higher. Different setup with rare shield + ring + rare boots can push HP over 5k

Updated March 2015!
62k self buffed tooltip = over 180k shotgun without shock and curse


Offense without charges


Outdated
Offense with 5 charge, RF and atziri's promise up


Updated March 2015!
Cut down a bit of health to 4k8 and fixing resist. 100% immunity can be achieved with Divination Distilate


Defense w/o flasks


Outdated
Defense with flasks up


Bonus

I have tested Spark with Fork and find it inferior to Pierce in both single target and clear sleed.

I tried to build around with a shield like this and voidbringer but ended up switching to dual wield wands for the projectile speed and damage. Crit it more consistent with shield and VB though.

Tested Spark frost wall and found out that it is very inconsistent (Video coming soon!). Despite the fact that it was apparently fix in 1.3:

"

It now bounces off Frost Walls, regardless of whether they are cast by players or monsters

In practice, sometime sparks will bounce off and most of the time it will pierce without any chance to pierce on Spark at all.

Failed Uber run to the queen (Have to cut on the way due to low fps)
Jungle Valley
Shrine
Atziri Run

Q: How do you use Divination Distilate reliably?
A: I have to swap to a lower Clarity gem so that when I cast Spark, my mana will not go up. I normally walk a few steps so my AA drain a certain amount of mana before casting to be sure.

Q: Did you try Warlord's Mark? The leech is awesome!
A: The leeching is nice with WM. However, it also grant Mana Leech, rendering Divination Distile unusable. If I would ever try with Saffell instead of dual wield, WM would be a good choice.

Q: Did you try CoD instead of high ES chest?

A: Tried cloak. Did not like it since I reserve almost all the mana anyway and I actually have more mana regen with my old hybrid chest (500es). Mana drain is really hard with spark and I can easily drain all my mana with faster casting or vaal haste up (240 mana reg atm).

Q: Why projectile weakness again?

A: a 20/20 Projectile weakness offer Pierce chance equal to a 20/20 Pierce gem without affecting pierce chance of Spark. It means that Spark can still pierce an enemy without going through Frost Wall, which opens opportunities for Vaal Glacier Hammer + Spark combo. Too bad that Spark is still buggy and the combo will not actually work all the time.

Q: How is clear speed with this build?

A: Clear speed with 75% pierce is acceptable but still feels a bit slow to me. Sparks really shine in indoor maps and boss fights.

Q: How is Dory's Catalyst compared to rare weapon?

A: It is a nice bonus to the damage thanks to the huge elemental damage mods. The elemental leech is extremely nice. However, you will lose around 50% crit mult, a bunch of crit chance and quite a bit of cast speed, which result in about 2k damamge loss with RF. I would say a weapon like mine will have a slight edge over Dory's Catalyst but it is also very very hard to find.

Q: How important is Atziri's Acuity?

A: It is a nice touch but it is not neccessary at all. I managed to get to lvl 94 and Uber atziri chamber without it. I have a bit more life and a significant cast speed boost since I do not have to use Life Leech gem. But that is about it. In fact, I think life leech with VP is much more stronger since you leech from every hit.

Q: Have you tried dual apeps or pledge? How do you about empower over say Crit multi?

A: I did not try with dual apeps or pledge. I personally think that a 6l pledge with Voll's Protector is the best setup but I tried to make it more accesible (this is the only build I did in Torment) so I chose dual wield weapon.

For dual apeps, I planned out a non crit builds and tried in Standard (I lose too much crit chance + crit mult to make a crit build using dual apeps). The result is not statisfying enought for me and I better off using something like Incinerate or Ball Lightning.

Empower do little to nothing compared to Crit Multi since this build focus a lot of crit. Even without Assasin's Mark, Crit Multi offer More damage multiplier with full powercharge up (~50% crit chance). If you have a BiS caster staff with +3 gem lvl then Empower might have an edge vs Crit Mult.

I have a Reddit discussion on Reddit about how pierced Spark really work.

IMO, Spark can be a really good skill if the hit mechanic is fixed so that spark can hit 1 target multiple times. Right now, I can cover the ground with Spark and some enemy do not even lose HP.

I can easily swap out Spark for Freezing Pulse and get slightly higher damage, safer clearing speed. The strengh of Spark is the ability to hit multiple times is being ignored since the only way to manipulate that (Frost Wall) is not behaving as expected with Spark.

To Do

- Get Warlord Mark, lvl up Purity of Lightning and attemp Atziri. Got lvl 21 PoL and lost it..
- Buy better wands.
- Level up

Updated
- Buy better sceptre (ideally with light leech) and belt.
- Buy Taste of Hate
- Better ES chest.
- Attempt Uber Atziri.

- Attempted Uber 2 times:
* First time I stopped at Uber Trio and let a service guy clear the rest at 2 portal. Got Acuity!
* Second time I stopped at Uber Atziri split phase. My network was not good and I was not confident enough to finish it. Rip set.
- Get to lvl 94. The build is very tanky if you play it right. Flasks can get me over 10k armour, over 90 resistant and mad leeching. I can also swap for self cast IC setup to get 10s immunity to physical. However, it is very easy to make mistake and forget to flask or blank cast IC.