Phork's budget discharger

I've been asked by quite a few people to put this build up for people like me who have wanted to try a discharge build but never had the uber items they've needed. Personally I've spent less than two exalts on her gear total and self found a few of them including one of my daggers.

First things first, let's look at the tree and get the one and most important part of the gear out of the way. You're going to need a Voll's Protector. There's no way around that for a budget discharger and I personally used a 4L one until level 60 when I was in act 3 of merciless when I finally bought my 5l for an exalt.



Now let's take a look at the important keystone's and passives that the build requires. Of course you're going to need Elemental Equilibrium as it's a necessity for downing bigger bosses and a reduction in resists for getting power charges is a great side effect. Blast Radius and Amplify are also two other must haves as with any discharge build. The area of effect is most important when doing fast clears for any type of area/map. Next, you're going to want all of the power charges and the endurance charge down by the Templar as charges = damage. Last but not least is Eldritch Battery. For those who've played a discharger based with power charges and Voll's Protector before, they know that mana issues get extreme once you break into Concentrated Effect gems. 50% mana reduction is very hard to deal with; but there's many easy ways around it.

Now, you'll see I've grabbed the passive Conduit. This isn't a necessity at all, but as I play with others often, it's nice to give back to the others taking the hits when I don't have to. So free charges for friends I figure was worth the four passives used to reach the passive which also opened up the 6%hp/8% mana nodes that I love so dearly in this tree.

As you can see, there's no energy shield on the character as it's left to Eldritch Battery to provide the necessary mana pool to have some regeneration capable of supporting multiple discharges. So with this, we have to stick to life and there's a total of 174% increased maximum life on the tree at level 79. By level 90, this will change to 254% by grabbing some additional nodes as the tree itself doesn't need anything else but life.



Now that we've explored the tree a little, let's make sure we get the right bandits which is easy. In normal you want to get the +40 base hp from Oak as it will compliment the life nodes in the tree quite well. In cruel however, we're just going to one shot all of the bandits and take the skill point. In merciless however, the decision is completely up to you. I took the power charges as it's easier to produce power charges than it is endurance, but you can take either one. I don't suggest the frenzy charge from Kraityn simply because we're running Elemental Equilibrium off of the cold damage from Ice Spear as we'll soon discuss. However, dropping the EE node and slapping on a set of high percentage Blood Dance boots can produce some nice effect as well. I prefer the EE as it results in easier kills on elemental resist mobs.



As you can see, the main ingredients for this build is the Rat's Nest, Voll's Protector, Voidbringers, and of course the Crit Chance daggers. With the small investment in critical chance in the tree and these items all combined, you can easily get 95% chance to crit with some power charges up. With such a high crit chance, you can easily chain the discharges quickly and drop multiple packs with insane quickness. I've ran piety runs over and over with this character and can honestly say, she can run to piety and kill all the mobs on her way in 3-5 minute averages. Switching gems from increased area of effect to concentrated effect enables her to usually one shot piety after proc'ing EE with ice spear.

Building charges is easy as could be. All it requires is a level 1 ice spear (I recommend a quality gem for the increase projectile speed), a greater multiple projectiles, and a lesser multiple projectiles gem. You can add in anything you want with it, including faster casting if you prefer. I simply am using the extra green slot in my Rat's Nest to level a pierce gem for another character I've been working on. Producing endurance charges is simply done with Enduring Cry. I used Warlord's Mark for a while but after time I didn't even require the endurance charges to kill most mobs and only need to have them for bigger mobs such as Kole or map bosses. So level up those enduring cry gems and put an increased area of effect gem on it. The goal with normal gear is to have 7 power charges and 4 endurance charges. I recently procured my tri-res belt with +1 Endurance Charge on it and enjoy having 5 power charges but it is far from a requirement for the build to function correctly. A good high life leather belt will do just fine.

Now for the hardest part of any character... The leveling. It's easily done. Simple run a fireball gem up until you can equip a Voll's Protector and a discharge gem. Once you have that you need your first set of daggers. I actually still have a set I switch to on harder maps as it can be a bit dicey and having some defense is always good.



Once you're set up, start exploding on your enemies with your three power charges and grab an enduring cry gem. Putting Increased Area of Effect on Enduring Cry is priceless and I can't say it enough to do it. The difference can be a couple charges which later in the game can end up being 10k+ damage on your discharge.

Last but absolutely not least, the second reason we have endurance charges instead of frenzy charges. If you mouse over my boots you'll notice I have Vaal Immortal Call attached to Increased Duration. The absolute biggest threat against a discharger like this is elemental reflect. However with the addition of Vaal Immortal Call, we have a way around it assuming we have enough souls for a charge on the gem. To deal with elemental reflect we'll proc some endurance charges with enduring cry and go near the elemental reflect mob. We'll build our power charges an tap the Vaal Immortal Call gem and have that cannot die buff. Once you have the buff and if your crit chance holds you can spam discharge until the reflect mob lies in waste. I've had mobs in 72+ maps that have taken 4 discharges to kill in this manner as my last few discharges only resulted in one or two charges. But with Vaal Immortal Call up, you're health may disappear but life leech will prevail and you'll be rid of one more elemental reflect mob. The only downside here, not having enough souls to use the gem. So using this technique can be finicky. There's times when I'm running in this gear (170% IIR) and simply have to skip that elemental reflect mob and come back with a fully charged gem. I don't like letting them live, and killing them with a skill that would most certainly eradicate me in the process makes me feel good inside.

So, there you have it. A budget discharge build that works quite well for basic play, or as a farmer as I do. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I'll do my best to keep up with this thread! Thanks for looking!

hi! i would like to request a video for it please

how much health do you even have?

No more than two posts on this one? Discharger is one of the builds I've always been curious about but have yet to attempt. Budget versions of builds that are typically expensive by nature are intriguing, and the only concern I have is echoed by peter: How much HP do you have? Is this rendition of discharger simply glass cannon? I'm not familiar with the survivability of the high-end discharge builds but it seems fairly low without some very careful play.

Of course, you've made it to 90 and cite 72+ maps, so it can't be all that bad, am I right?