[2.2] Crit Ele Wander - Kinetic Blast - Hybrid Life/ES/Evasion Trickster [Videos]

Level 90 Vaal Pact Skill Tree

139% Life, 81% ES before Int, 174% Evasion before Dex, 230% Increased Crit Chance, 175% increased Crit Multiplier (for a total of 325%)

I don't bother getting the Power charge because I'm crit-capped without it, if you don't have a Rat's Nest you will probably need to spend 3 points to pick it up

Leveling Skill Tree (level 28)

Going to the wand cluster right away makes leveling with Storm Prisons a Blast! (pun intended) Kinetic Blast - LMP can be used from level 28 and with 5 Power Charges, the damage is pretty ridiculous for a low level character. You will probably find yourself facerolling everything until Merciless with this setup.

Level 38

Grab more Life to survive Act 4.

Level 57/End of Cruel

At some point in Cruel, get your Heralds-Curse on Hit-Assassin's Mark 4-link going and replace your Storm Prisons with a 1-3c wand as described in the Gear Options section - this wand will boost your damage significantly and last you all the way to level 75-80. This should give you enough damage to basically let you pick up only Life nodes until Merciless.

Level 72/Start of Mapping

By this point, assuming you've done Merciless Labyrinth, you should have reliable Frenzy Charge generation from Swift Killer, so pick up all the Frenzy charges. Grab Vaal Pact and get started on maps!

Main skill: Kinetic Blast - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Weapon Elemental Damage - Increased Critical Strikes - Added Lightning Damage (5th) - Pierce (6th)

The KB - Pierce mechanic works as follows: When KB pierces a target, it will cause its explosions, and still continue on to the next target. This can cause you to kill packs 1.5-2 screens away! I highly recommend using a loot filter with drop sounds. You will be surprised at how far away some of your dropped items will be. Of course, be very careful that you have capped resists, some form of leech (duelist nodes or Warlord's Mark), and Vaal Pact before putting on Pierce or you will die to off-screen reflect.

Some people like to link KB with Chain, but this is completely inferior to Pierce after the buffs in 2.2. A level 20 Pierce grants 29% MORE damage on top of allowing half your KBs to pierce and kill other packs off-screen. Unlike Chain, Pierce also doesn't reduce KB's single-target damage at all, and in fact increases it. 29% More damage vs 31% Less damage means that a Pierce setup deals 87% MORE damage (1.29/0.69 = 1.87) compared to a Chain setup - this is simply too massive of a difference to ignore.

Heralds: Herald of Ice - Herald of Thunder - Curse on Hit - Assassin's Mark/Warlord's Mark

These add elemental damage to your attacks, and apply Assassin's Mark to enemies to generate Power charges and restore some life/mana. If you have a Victario's Acuity amulet or some other source of Power charge generation and want a more defensive option, replace Assassin's Mark with Warlord's Mark. This will greatly increase your leech, improving your survivability against reflect, and generate Endurance Charges that help keep you alive.

Defensive 4-link: Cast when Damage Taken - Immortal Call - Increased Duration - Enfeeble/Vaal Haste

The Vaal Haste does not work with CwDT, but it does still benefit from Increased Duration and is a very strong defensive option.

Optional: Yolo 4-link: Vaal Power Siphon - Chain - Weapon Elemental Damage - Increased Critical Strikes

Credit where credit is due to Mathil for this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STGXYE7ZUBc. This 4-link is fun as hell for Dried Lake farming, or any open maps like Canyon and Arid Lake. This skill fires a projectile at every mob on your screen, but the range scales with Projectile Speed, meaning in reality you will basically one-shot everything within 1-1.5 screens of you. Ridiculously fun to play with.

Optional: Single-target skill: Barrage - Faster Attacks - Weapon Elemental Damage - Added Lightning Damage/Increased Critical Strikes

Until I got a Carcass Jack and 20% Quality Kinetic Blast, I found using Barrage to be a good single-target DPS option. Some people prefer Frenzy as well. Frenzy linked with Power Charge on Crit has the potential to sustain your charges even on bosses like Atziri with long periods of single-target. However, I don't actually use a single-target 4-link anymore. With a Carcass Jack and a quality Kinetic Blast, your explosion radius is huge enough that KB becomes very easy to use even on single-target - you just have to be a bit creative by luring enemies to a wall, or placing Frost Walls properly.

Utility 1: Flame Dash - Frost Wall - Faster Casting

Frost Wall is used to set up wall shots - when KB impacts on a wall, the explosions go off (even if your KB pierces the Frost Wall) on both sides of the wall. Just try it out with KB and Frost Wall in your hideout and you will understand how it works. This means placing a Frost Wall in front of, or behind an enemy is an easy way to turn KB-GMP into a monster of a single-target skill capable of killing most map bosses in only a few hits.

Utility 2: Summon Ice/Flame Golem - Vaal Discipline/Vaal Grace - whatever

Use the Ice Golem until you're crit-capped (95% crit chance) with Power charges, then feel free to switch to a Flame Golem, or switch out a Crit piece of gear for something more defensive. Put Vaal Auras or whatever else you want to use in the remaining two sockets. You can also run a third aura, like Arctic Armour, but I personally find only having enough mana to cast 1 or 2 spells very annoying.

My current skill tree




The only expensive thing here is the Carcass Jack, which I 6-linked myself, but it is not at all required. A low-roll Rat's Nest is 15c these days, and Victario's is 40c, but neither unique is required.

Wand
There are two things that matter here: Elemental Damage and Crit Chance. Attack Speed, Crit Multi, or Accuracy are a nice bonus, but not at all required. Sage, Omen, and Prophecy wands have a 9% Crit base, vs the 8% of all other wands, making them the optimal choice. I bought my wand by going to poe.trade, sorting all wands by ele damage, and then finding one with decent crit that was within my price range.

Here is an example of a good starter wand you can find for 2c:


Craft some Crit onto this using Bowmaker's Tools (requires Tora 5 for the good crit mod) and it will last you until level 75-80.

Storm Prisons (1 or 2, your choice) can be used for leveling, allowing you to get 5 Power Charges at low levels, which is ridiculously powerful with Fusillade and makes even a basic KB - LMP setup very powerful. I used 2 Storm Prisons for the entirety of Normal and Cruel.

Helmet
Best: Rat's Nest is the ideal choice, with lots of crit, evasion, and even some attack/move speed to boost clear speed.
Good: Any rare helmet with Life, ES and/or Evasion, and resists.

Chest
Best+: Carcass Jack is pretty much perfect in every way, giving you ~600 EHP, ~2200 Evasion, helping you cap resists, and substantially buffing Kinetic Blast's AoE.
Good: Any rare chest with Life, ES and/or Evasion, and resists. Belly of the Beast also works here.

Gloves
Good: Thunderfist gives you Evasion, ES, damage, attack speed, and even works as a pseudo 5-link. Put Barrage here for better single-target, or Vaal Power Siphon for even more hilarious map clearing.

Good: Maligaro's Virtuosity can be used if you're below the crit cap, but they're pretty weak aside from the crit.

Good: Any rare gloves, with some combination of added ele damage, attack speed, life, ES/Evasion, and resists.

Balls-to-the-wall offense: Facebreakers. Tons of damage. Zero defense. Fun as hell if you like that kind of playstyle. If you ever feel like the build's damage is slowing down and you're not one-shotting packs anymore... just give Facebreakers a try.

Special snowflake: Southbound. Believe it or not, this works, since with 95% crit chance you're almost guaranteed to Freeze mobs, and the damage, life, and resists on these gloves are better than all the other options. Probably still too clunky unless you're going to play in a party.

Boots
Best: Rare boots with Life, ES, and Move Speed.

Good: Atziri's Step. Gives you a total of 19% Spell Dodge with your ascendancy, but I find that that's still too unreliable, and these boots lack resits and life compared to a good rare alternative.

Belt
As much life as possible (this should be your highest +Life piece!), resists of course, ES is a bonus. Try to find a belt with Increased Elemental Damage with Weapons, or an open prefix to craft it on.

Prismweave is an excellent cheap (1 alch) belt for leveling. It will boost your damage pretty significantly for the first 40-50 levels.

Dyadian Dawn is an interesting option for Phys Reflect maps. Normally, you still do a little bit of phys damage, which is far too little to threaten you, but enough to stop your ES recharge - equipping this belt eliminates this problem.

Shield
You can get a lot of ES here. Otherwise, Life, Evasion, resists, you know the drill.

Amulet
Victario's Acuity is a great option - it makes your Charge generation much more reliable, and provides a sizeable DPS boost. Otherwise, find a good rare amulet with Life and %increased Energy Shield. There are about a million good mods here, so just find any decent combination of Life/ES/%Evasion/Ele damage/%Ele damage/attack speed/crit/crit multi/resists and craft something else decent on.

Rings
Diamond Rings may be necessary to reach the crit cap. Otherwise, look for anything with the same type of mods as recommended for the amulet above. A Doedre's Damning is also an option if you want to run dual-curse (in this case, I recommend Warlord's Mark + Assassin's Mark on Herald of Ice in a 4-link, Assassin's Mark on Herald of Thunder in a 3-link, and Enfeeble + Temp Chains on CWDT).

Jewels



The first 2 were 5-10c on poe.trade, the third is a crappy placeholder until I can get a AS/Life/Damage jewel.

The offensive stat the tree lacks the most is attack speed, so you want to try and pick some up on jewels. % Life, % Max Energy Shield, resists, proj speed, proj damage, crit chance (if not capped yet), and crit multi are all good stats too. "Attack speed with wands" is not a very popular stat, so it's quite easy to find cheap, effective jewels with it.

With the release of 2.2, many Crit builds are scrambling to pick up Assassin to get their crit up as easily as possible - don't. Assassin is a fine class for builds that have trouble getting a good amount of base crit, like caster builds or Quill Rain CoC, but wands have by far the highest base crit in the game, and as a result, most of the Crit nodes in the Assassin ascendancy would simply be wasted. Additionally, although Deadly Infusion is quite strong, Unstable Infusion is simply a garbage node, being a COMPLETE waste of an Ascendancy notable for a crit-capped wander.

Instead, we choose Trickster for its defensive benefits - mainly Shade Form, which is an absurdly strong defensive node. %Evasion, %ES, move speed, attack speed, Dodge, and Faster energy shield recharge all synergize incredibly well to give us a whole heap of all the stats we want. Additionally, the remaining 2 points give us reliable Frenzy charge generation that allows us to forego Blood Rage (which would be very annoying on a hybrid character).

Normal - Help Oak
Cruel - Help Kraitlyn/Kill all
Merciless - Help Alira

No, this is not tooltip wizardry using some Haste + Vaal Haste + Atziri's Promise + Vinktar's + Silver flask shenanigans to make a fake tooltip that looks really high. That's the actual number on my tooltip once I've built my Frenzy and Power charges.

Actually, the real DPS is much higher since 1) All enemies will be shocked from your crits, 2) Enemies can get hit by multiple Kinetic Blast and Herald of Ice explosions

If you really want to see a big DPS number, if we assume a single target against a wall that gets hit by 1 projectile and about half of the explosions, the estimated DPS is about 510k. This matches my observations of absolutely destroying bosses that are up against a wall.