MoreRain: Life&ES CoC Discharge [2.2]

Ascendancy Class
#1 Scion Berserker/Pathfinder: drop life leech gem for blade vortex or drop ice nova for inc aoe
#2 Witch Occultist Malediction + Forbidden Power

Video with tactics discussion

2.2 Witch Passive Tree
Banidts Krait/Krait/Alira (Oak is good too)

If you don't have Enlighten 3+4 grab Charisma for 4pts. After that, if you don't have a +1 curse devotion, grab double curse ASAP (or just take Occultist) and then (higher than L72 required) Templar AoE and then Templar intuitive leap.


With scion pathfinder meginord's belt isn't required, so you could use a chaos res belt there.

For Atziri switch to:

And use Purity of Fire - Purity of Lightning - Discipline. For everything else use Blasphemy-Asn Mark, Discipline, Purity of Elements.

You need an anti-freeze flask for clearing blue mobs. For bosses my flasks were as follows:
Vaals:

Trio:

Atziri:

This is a cast on crit cyclone discharger that relies on Energy Shield. The build is inspired by Doeboy's Cast on Cyclone over in Shadow forum. The main difference is that I use ES and Ghost Reaver instead of Acrobatics and Evasion. Having a larger total HP pool is better than relying on Dodge/Eva.

Why is this the most OP build in PoE? It can easily reach L100 because of very good defense (8-9k EHP + 11k armor + 88-92 res + 5-6 ECs). It has the highest damage in most 6man parties (all 6man parties in 1m or 3m leagues). It can clear gorge in 3 minutes while wearing 300iir and 110iiq. It can do uber atziri deathless. It can do core malachai deathless (p1 p2). It can even do double boss vaal temple with vulnerability deathless. Its damage is 10-15% less than a almost fully-mirrored reaver at 10% of the cost. In fact I believe this build is so OP, it needs to be nerfed; if it's not nerfed it will make the metagame stale. The only downside is the lag and screen flashes from discharge, but it's something you can get used to and play around (don't attack strongboxes in parties).

I started this character around August 20 2015. By the end of Warbands on Oct 2 2015 I was L99 and position 73 on the ladder. On Oct 13 2015 I finished L100 in standard. This is the first build I've played that I thought was viable for L100 and my first L100. As a result I can assure you that this build is viable for absolutely all content in the game.

Doeboy - created the life/eva/acro Cast on Cyclone build on which this build is based. He thought the life/es hybrid version wouldn't work. That actually made me play this build to try and prove him wrong.
Aim_Deep - significant improvements to the tree early on.
Sherkhan - for introducing me to the power of hybrid builds back in 1.2.
Skyion - for uber atziri tactics, RoTP specifically.
PoE17 - for giving great answers to many people's questions in this thread.

Budget
This build should only be done as your second build. I recommend starting out with this build and then respecing. The reason is that it's not very good without voll's devotion and a 5L voll's protector as well as about 5ex worth of other gear.

Cyclone Cost Sustain
When linked to Increased Crit Strikes and Life Leech cyclone costs 25 mana per use. The easiest way to cover this cost is to get -15 or -16 mana cost of skills and two jewels with "Mana gained on hit." This means our cyclone will cost 9-10 mana per use and return 8 mana per enemy hit. The reason it returns 8 is because we have 4 MGOH and cyclone is guaranteed to hit twice. The 1-2 mana deficit is covered by the fact that we have 7-8 mana regen per second.

Blade Vortex, 20% Surgeon's and Ice Nova
If you have the old Surgeon's flasks that have a 100% change to grant a charge on crit you can choose to use ice nova/freeze pulse or blade vortex. See which one you like better. I believe BV will do mork single target damage but IN/FP grants more utilitiy and safety by freezing most stuff.

If you only have the 20% surgeon's flasks, you have to use Blade Vortex and the Magnate belt. This way you'll be guaranteed to stay at maximum flask charges.

Elemental Equilibrium
Each time you hit a enemy with an attack or spell of element x it will receive +25% resistance to x and -50% resistance to y and z. This buff/debuff lasts for 5 seconds. As soon as you hit with another attack or spell the buff/debuff gets changed. The old buff/debuff is completely forgotten. As a result with a build like ours we are cycling through different buffs/debuffs many times per second. The idea is to order our attacks and spells in a way so that each one sets up the next one to do more damage. The way we do this is by choosing an element for our cyclone attack. My calculator tells me this should be fire. Then we choose the first spell we want to cast with our CoC (spells are cast in order by distance in links to the CoC gem). Since our cyclone gave enemies +25% fire res and -50% cold and lightning we will put our first spell to be ice nova. Ice nova will benefit from the negative cold resistance, and it will give our enemies +25% cold res and -50% light and fire res. At this point our second spell, discharge will hit with lightning and fire damage giving our enemies +25% fire and lightning res and -50% cold res. Then the cycle repeats with cyclone. We don't care about our enemies having +25% fire resistance against cyclone because the cyclone itself doesn't do any damage.

Life+Energy Shield Scaling
This build relies on life+energy shield. You get life from leveling up and from +life on gear pieces. You get energy shield from the discipline aura and from your gear pieces. Since we use Ghost Reaver we leech energy shield and not life. As a result our goal is to get enough energy shield so that we never have to worry about re-healing our life. Also we get about 180% increased energy shield on the tree and only 100% life, so on pieces such as belt, boots, helmet, and shield we prefer to get 50 energy shield over 50 life when we have the choice. However life helps prevent stuns (you get stunned if a hit does more than 50% of your max life) and status ailment (based on your max life but their formulas are more complicated). So getting at least 3000 life is a good idea. After that point you need to make sure you get a high amount of energy shield from your helmet and shield, since these are the major sources of your ES.

Chaos Resistance
Our build only has 3k life with good gear and L90. As a result we need a high amount of chaos resistance to not die to chaos damage. I recommend around +30% in merciless. That means 90% total from our gear. Until you get that amount, a amethyst flask is recommended when you know the boss or mob type in the area will do chaos damage.


Damage Scaling
We scale damage in several ways: attack speed, critical strike chance, critical strike multiplier, # charges, spell damage. Our overall DPS is some product of these attributes (meaning they are all multiplied together). To maximize a product subject to budget constraints you want all the attributes to be balanced. For example consider the following math problem: maximize x*y such that x+y=1. Setting x=0.9 and y=0.1 (a unbalanced solution) leads to x*y=0.09. Whereas x=0.5 y=0.5 leads to x*y=0.25. In path of exile the issue is slightly complicated by the fact that we're not simply maximizing x*y but something like ax*by*cz^2 subject to 3x+5y+100z=20. If you want to understand the math itself, read up on non-linear optimization. However to optimize your build in PoE you don't have to understand the math, the best way to understand which attribute leads to the biggest DPS increase is to use a DPS calculator. I recommend you use the discharge DPS calculator I made.

Attack speed increases the number of times we hit a target and how many spells it procs. Critical strike chance comes in three forms: melee critical strike chance, spell critical strike chance and global critical strike chance. Global critical strike chance is the best for our build, because it double dips. Double dips means it multiplies our final DPS two times. The first time is when it produces more crits so we cast more spells. The second time is when it makes the spells we cast crit more for more damage. Melee and spell crit chance increase the consistency of our damage. The reason a diamond flask is much better for us than other crit builds is because its effect double dips.

Spell damage and critical strike multiplier affect the damage done by our spells. The # of PC and EC charges we can get is capped at 3/3 to start. If we raise this cap we can get more charges accumulated when the CoC gem fails to proc, so that when it does proc we do more damage. However we only really need 4/4, 5/5 is nice if it's inexpensive, and 6/6 is just unnecessary.

The dagger
Our dagger's base attacks per second and crit chance affect our overall performance significantly. A dagger with 1.3 attacks per second will do 25% less overall DPS than a dagger with 1.7 attacks per second. Likewise our daggers base crit is multiplied by all our crit stats. So a dagger with 6% crit chance will have 25% less overall crit than one with 8%. As a result you want a dagger with around 1.6 APS and 8.0 crit to start off with. An then look for upgrades 1.7/8.0 1.6/8.3 and eventually 1.7/8.3.


Trigger Gems
Trigger gems are gems that do something once a certain condition (the trigger) is met. The trigger gems we use are cast when damage taken. We use two versions of these gems to reflect the fact that we want to do different things at different damage thresholds. These gems are very important and their absence/presence can break or make a build!

We use a L1 CWDT linked to a L5 warlords mark to basically say "as soon as we take any damage cast warlord's mark so we can leech even more and heal even faster." We could link a L8 arctic breath to also chill our enemies here, but it's unecessary. If you have passives or items that allow you to curse enemies with additional curses, you can add them here, but warlord's mark is the only necessary one.


We use a second CWDT at L20. This happens when we take a lot (3.5k) of damage, so this one is meant to help us survive in dangerous situations. This CWDT will cast immortall call, consuming our endurance charges and granting us physical immunity for a short amount of time. It will also cast cold snap that should freeze our enemies. These two mechanics are meant to stop incoming damage for a long enough period of time to allow us to either re-heal through leech or log-out if we decide to. We also cast our ice golem here so we don't have to worry about summoning him.


How to Cyclone
Your cyclone gem should be L1 to minimize mana cost. We don't care about the damage of our cyclone.

The way crits work in cyclone is that either your entire cyclone is fully crits or fully no crits. As a result you want to make tiny cyclones so you don't get stuck in a long cyclone of no crits.

You want to cyclone by clicking at the feet of your character. You also want to get movement speed on your boots and tree to increase the number of hits per second your cyclone does. The perfect DPS flask for our build is a diamond of adrenaline:





Gameplay tips
Cast enduring cry before engaging a dangerous pack of monsters. This gives you ECs for CWDT IC to proc if you take a lot of physical damage before you CoC, and if you do CoC these ECs will be used to do more damage. So by casting the cry you're making yourself safer, as well as boosting your damage at the same time.

Use decoy totem to fight dangerous bosses like village ruin. Cast it to the side, wait for the boss to engage the totem and then move in to attack them. You can use this moment to cast enduring cry if you need to.

Keep a vaal discipline charged. Think of this as e energy shield potion, to be used if you need to fight a boss who moves around (like Colosseum Daresso) or if there are multiple bosses (like Excavation or Village Ruin). Basically any situtation where it's difficult for you to constantly be hitting something and leeching.

Tips for improving FPS, and reducing lag.

What map mods are dangerous for this build? Answered by PoE17.

How does CoC discharge compare against legacy Mjolner? Answered by PoE17.

What's your tree/gear/jewels, PoE17? Answered by PoE17.

Unique
Atziri (done at clvl 85)
Poorjoy's Asylum (2p) (done at clvl 80ish)
Hall of Grandmasters



L74 (done at clvl 76)
Double Boss Torture Chamber
Unid Jungle Valley Boss

L79
Overgrown Ruin boss
Double boss +Vulnerability Vaal Temple

L80
Excavation boss double boss, onslaught, vulnerability.

L81
Palace

L82
Core Malachai
Colosseum Daresso Vulnerability, 2p Health
Abyss Kaom Enfeeble, Speed, 3p Health

Even more Videos.

The Most OP CoC Discharge Calculator