[2.0] ☼ Spark of Shards ☼

This is my staff. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

You're going to need a Sire of Shards, no way around that really. Your Spark links will always be in your weapon, regardless of having a 6L or 5L chest or a +1 Tabula or whatever. The nice thing about having your damage in your weapon is you can weapon swap at any time to completely stop damage. Even spiders already created will not deal damage, since the snap-shotting update/fix.

Spark Links


Ahh this ring. I personally detest this ring and think it is far too good for how obtainable and easy it is to just slap on any lightning build. Makes your lightning spells freeze/chill and gives you decent damage and mana regen. The only thing it doesn't have is life. Use it. Hate it - but use it.

Other Links


My Tempest gear:


Jewels
Jewels are crucial for this build, a lot of our projectile speed and life depend heavily on them, and by endgame we will have 6 total sockets on our tree.
Prioritize life and proj speed, and keep an eye out for cast speed and crit multi where possible. Of course jewels are so varied there is no hard and fast rule to what you should use, but those are the guidelines I use. There is no limit to how much you can spend on jewels to make your character better.
Here are some examples of good jewels for this build;


Rain of Splinters

To level the build I suggest going directly to Ancestral Bond and leveling as double flame-totem crit. Not only is Flame Totem absurdly powerful sub level 70~ it also benefits from most of what we're doing anyway. After Ancestral Bond the next key piece of our build is Piercing Shots, which we simply cannot play Spark without - for that reason this is your second port of call, picking up efficient life and damage nodes on the way.

Here's what I suggest doing with your first 75 points:

After that start filling in crit, life and jewel slots as desired until you think you are ready to make the switch™.

Important to note: Do not use Sire of shards with Flame Totem. It doesn't do much for your damage or even area coverage, but it will obscure the ground so much that there is no doubt in my mind you will die to something ground based like Storm Bearers and friends. Just use a nice +flat damage wand with projectile speed and a +2 fire for your totem itself and you'll thank me later.

Bandits:
Oak for that sweet sweet hp.
Alira for 5% cast speed.
Alira again for +1 power charge.

When doing the bandits (on any build really, not just this one) - just ask yourself: "Would I allocate a point with this reward on the tree if it was on my path?".
If you say yes to any of the rewards, take that reward. If not, take the skill-point. Easy. In our case 5% cast speed is better efficiency for cast speed than a point on the tree, and we'd take cast speed at that rate if we could. 40 life we'd definitely take as we can't get life on shield and one of our rings and every bit of base life matters in one-shot land. As for the power charge, I don't think 2 points for a charge on the tree is worth it until very late into the build, however if they were 1 point I would take them in a heartbeat.

80 Point Tree:
I wouldn't personally swap to Spark until at least 90 points, but if you're sick of Flame Totem and want to put that Sire to use then this is the earliest you can put the final pieces of the puzzle together.

100 Point Tree

Now you have all accessible duration, crit, high efficiency hp and damage nodes. Start allocating 5% HP nodes and 2-point jewel nodes as you see fit.
Finally, when you have a lot of points that you can free up from 5% hp or jewel nodes, buy an Intuitive Leap and use it to allocate the following 6 points.

Optionally, you can also take Sentinel here if you so desire.
These final 6 points give you 30% totem placement speed, 25% increased skill duration, 5% cast speed and 24% increased damage.
The placement speed, cast speed and duration are the primary reasons for doing this - I'd pay 6 points for that alone - the added damage is just gravy.

After doing the above with an Intuitive Leap, go back and take any 2 point jewels you unspecced.
Finally, take either 5%life nodes or power charges depending on your own preference of hardcore/softcore, gear level, map level you like to run etc.

The best way to scale Spark's damage is crit, and when you are already getting 90-100% increased damage from your weapon alone and pathing through the best crit in the tree out of necessity that becomes even more true. In addition due to our weapon being a staff we can take advantage of we can take advantage of the very powerful Serpent Stance passive.

My current Tempest stats:


Critical strike also allows us to easily shock and shatter enemies since we deal split lightning-cold damage with wide damage ranges and hit very often.

Spark's interaction with the shot-gunning changes is not very intuitive so I will explain here as best I can.

First, all spiders created by the same cast of spark (7/9 spiderlings in our case) share a memory of what monsters they have hit. If any one of those spiders hits a monster, none of those spiders can hit that monster again. However! if any one of those spiders bounce off a wall or object, that memory is completely cleared of all monsters not hit in the last 1 second.

What does this mean for us? Well since we have so many spiders out all the time that move very quickly, we can assume for the most part as long as we have a totem up and casting, it is hitting all monsters in range once a second for full damage with each wave of its sparks until they expire.
As our spiders last 2.55 seconds, this effectively means we deal whatever the tool-tip damage is for a spider 3 times per cast to each monster (once at roughly 0 seconds, once at roughly 1 second, once at roughly 2 seconds).
Since we cast every more than once a second and have two totems not one, our best-case area damage can be obtained with the following formula
To summarise, your best-case damage per second in an area can be obtained by the following formula:

1/castTime * numberOfTotems * (spiderDurationRoundedDown + 1) * averageDamageSpiderDamage

In my case this works out to be
1/0.4 * 2 * 3 * 900~ = 13500 DPS.

Not bad, but we haven't factored critical strike damage yet.
Since I personally run at about 55%~ crit chance with 380%~ crit multi that DPS is actually
(13500 * .45) + (13500 * .55 * 3.80)
34290 DPS.

Now that's not an outstanding amount of damage or anything, but keep in mind that your damage is being applied to absolutely everything, even monsters you can't see off the screen. The DPS tapers off the further the targets are from the totem - as it becomes less reliable that they are being hit every second by a spider from every cast, but the range that this happens is surprisingly far, and can be improved with projectile speed.

Mind Over Matter and Immortal Flesh combine to make us extremely tanky against anything that doesn't one-shot us. This in addition to the innately safe playstyle of dual totems makes us very unlikely to die without making a mistake.

My current Tempest stats:


May seem like an odd item to equip on any character, and to be honest I was initially sceptical too. If you consider that most peoples defensive problems in 2.0 come from high physical hits, the belt starts to become more attractive. The -50 damage from attacks makes us much stronger against machine-gun like attacks, think of it like 1/2 a pre-2.0 Arctic Armour for phys only. The high life and mana regen allow us to shrug off frequent small hits of any kind, something mind over matter usually struggles to do due to low life regen. The main downside of -5% max is partially negated by the 30% of damage to mana since elemental hits would not one shot us with our life buffer anyway, and the Immortal Flesh helps us run Mind Over Matter effectively with its mana regen (equivilent to a little over half of clarity) and huge life regen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uJHgsgsCG4 Higher quality when it finishes processing.