[3.13] Smokemantra's Blade Blast Inquisitor - Budget Friendly - 7k+ eHP

Blade Blast: this spell will be the crux of this build, and the reason it shines in the endgame. During the leveling process I suggest using this on a 4-link as a secondary addition to Bladefall. Later on, we swap these skills.

Blade Blast - Physical to Lightning - Hypothermia* - Controlled Destruction - Energy Leech - Increased Area of Effect

Phys to Lightning helps us achieve full Elemental Conversion (important!), and Increased AoE will let us have a big AoE Radius on Blade Blast (hopefully near 30) without having to rely on the passive tree too much. Remember to upgrade CD and IAoE to their Awakened versions when you can.

*Hypothermia does not do anything if we don't have Hrimsorrow or another way to convert Physical to Cold. Once we do have this, Hypothermia becomes great for damage.

The Blade Blast AoE Radius I suggest to aim for is 29-30, and hopefully not less than 27. While I highly recommend IAoE, if you feel like you have enough AoE (which tbh is probably not the case) you can swap it for something like Increased Critical Damage or Added Fire.

Bladefall: this is what I call the "Engine" of the build that allows Blade Blast to shine. During most of the leveling process this will be the main skill we use for clear. Early on this would be the spell we put on our biggest link item (Tabula, etc).

Bladefall - Unleash - Spell Cascade - Concentrated Effect

Once we're using Blade Blast as our main damage, Bladefall should work just fine on a 4-link.

Unleash and Cascade help cost efficiency and let Bladefall spawn more blades over its AoE. Concentrated Effect will concentrate the blades over a smaller area so that more Blade Blasts overlap on our target. In the end these all help us deal more damage. For single target, we also have the option of removing Spell Cascade if we prefer to but I have never felt any need to do it. Also regarding Spell Cascade, it increases the AoE of Bladefall with levels so it's perfectly fine to leave it at level 1 and it might be more desirable to do so, although just like the previous option I have never felt the need to de-level my own gem.

For a 5th link I highly recommend Faster Casting to speed up the cast time (less time spent casting means more time escaping from incoming damage and faster clears in the long run).

For a 6th link, well, it's pretty optional, I didn't use a 6th link myself. We don't really need Bladefall to do more damage (even though it will actually deal a good amount of damage, it should kill normal T16 mobs with just the 4-link) so we basically have 3 alternatives: 1. put a damage link anyway (Hypothermia/Controlled Destruction/Energy Leech/Phys to Lightning/Cold to Fire), 2. put a utility/damage link (like Intensify/Power Charge on Crit or something else of your choice) or 3. use the 6th socket for a non-linked skill (Blood Rage/Portal/mobility skill/an extra aura/Golem skill). I'm actually putting Portal here, just because.

If we face Physical Reflect, it's useful to at least have an extra Phys to Lightning gem to link to Bladefall in place of Concentrated Effect.

4-link Auras in our Helmet slot: Hatred, Zealotry, Herald of Purity, Discipline (with Enlighten as an option)

When leveling we won't have the option to use more than 2, so we can use just Zealotry early on, and add Discipline once we start using EB for extra survivability. Discipline can also be added early on if we're comfortable with having more of our Mana reserved. Oue final Aura setup is mae possible if we have our Diadem and if we have the reduced Mana reserved from pathing towards Sovereignty an Influence. If we lack ES we can drop HoP until we get more. For more details read the lower sections.

In short, we use 2 auras that are not negotiable (Hatred and Zealotry) and we will use one or two more that will depend on preference (these can be Wrath, Discipline, Herald of Purity, Herald of Ash, Arctic Armour). My personal pick so far is Discipline with Herald of Purity.

4-link Orb of Storms setup: Orb of Storms - Assassin's Mark - Curse on Hit - Power Charge on Crit

Orb of Storms is our spell of choice for this setup because we can cast it once and it will stay on the ground for a duration, dealing damage and getting procs of our linked gems. We use this for both clearing and bossing, when clearing we will drop it on a pack and it should grant us max Power Charges pretty quickly, then we can forget about it until we need to refresh our Power Charges, and against Bosses we can leave our Orb of Storms on the ground before the fight starts to be able to cast from long range at the start of the fight, and the main purpose here will be both to generate Power Charges and to Curse the boss with Assassin's Mark, which will give us more damage (the Orb of Storms will basically be casting the curse so that we don't have to).

So those are the 2 purposes of this gem setup: applying Assassin's Mark and generating Power Charges against Bosses. Later on, we will want to acquire a ring that gives "Assassin's Mark on Hit", because with this we can stop using the Curse On Hit and Assassin't Mark gems in favour of extra Utility gems (more details for options below). Apart from this, we also have the option to get any kind of effect that grants us Power Charges on Crit/on Hit, and if we do manage to do this, we can also drop the Orb of Storms and Power Charge on Crit gems, so in the end we can ditch the whole 4-link and get something else.

Mobility: Dash - Second Wind. This is my mobility skill of choice because I personally like Dash but you can change it in favor of whatever you prefer. Flame Dash is a very good alternative (it doesn't need a support like Dash does), which would let us use our gem sockets for something else.

Survivability: Immortal Call - Cast when Damage Taken. Since we're pretty fragile, this will boost our overall survivability. These two gems should not be leveled up too high, personally I use them at levels 6 and 4 respectively. If we have a spare link, we can add Increased Duration to this setup.

Extra Utility: We use Blood Rage as an easy way to generate Frenzy Charges. This will be the only purpose of this skill, so we can leave it at level 1 and we don't need to add quality (or we can level it up anyway, it doesn't matter). This skill will cause us to regenerate Life and ES slower, so we can choose not to activate it in hard situations. It also generates charges with kills, which means we will not be using it on bosses unless they have some sort of minions or monsters we can kill. This skill is not necessary if we can generate Frenzy Charges through other means.

On a similar note, getting a way to generate Endurance Charges is also useful, although not required. For example there is the Enduring Cry gem, which will also provide us with an extra heal in a pinch.

If we have spare sockets, Portal is nice, even more so if we can afford to link it with Cast on Death so we can return to action quickly if we happen to die.

As I mentioned before, we can also add any Golem of our choice (of which I'd suggest Stone or Lightning) or even an extra Aura if we happen to have enough unreserved Mana. For example, if you are using Discipline instead of Wrath then you might be able to fit an extra 25% reservation aura, and for this I would recommend Arctic Armour, Herald of Purity/Ash or Aspect of the Avian/Cat.

This build cannot acquire Arcane Surge by using the gem (because we don't spend Mana for our spells). Arcane Surge would be a very solid damage increase but if we want it we will have to acquire it through other means (Equipment, Arcane Heroism notable in a Spell Large Cluster Jewel, Watcher's Eye Zealotry affix, etc.)

We want to have a Life flask at all times, and it should have the Staunching suffix (to remove Bleeding and Corrupted Blood). For the prefix I like Panicked, or Bubbling if we don't have that.

We also want to have a Quicksilver flask at all times. Here the suffix depends on personal preference and on the rest of our flask setup. The remaining useful suffixes are Adrenaline, Draining, Quickening and Warding (as well as the Crit Chance bench craft). We want to have at least one flask with Warding, and the rest will be optional. I do suggest getting Warding here.

We will want a Taste of Hate, which will fit the build really well providing both damage and survivability.

We will want a Crit flask, which most of the time will be a Diamond flask. This flask is very important! It generally is very important for any kind of Crit character. This flask must have the Warding suffix (unless our Quicksilver has Warding). In an endgame setup this flask can and probably should be replaced thanks to the 3.13 Inquisitor buffs giving us a lot of Crit Chance. A damage oriented replacement would be a Bottled Faith, which also adds Crit Chance but most importantly amplifies the damage the opponents take. Bottled Faith is very expensive so it is not a priority. It's also fine to use a defensive flask as a replacement and anything works for this purpose, for example a Rumi's Concoction would be very nice to get some extra physical damage reduction and Block Chance.

For the fifth flask we use Atziri's Promise, which will give us damage, life leech and chaos resistance, all very useful. Another options would be Cinderswallow Urn (particularly for survivability while mapping) or Rumi's (extra Block = extra survivability). Alternatively we can use other flasks here depending on what we need, like Quartz, Silver, Sulphur, etc.

and some items I also had but forgot to link here during Delirium:

As can be seen, many of these items have very good mods, and they were quite simple to acquire thanks to the Harvest league mechanic.

To be able to use this build, we want at least 160 Dexterity (we will need a bare minimum of 155 to use level 20 Blade Blast, and level 21 will need 159). Strength and Intelligence are not so relevant because we will never have less than what we need. Getting enough Dexterity will be an issue to solve (but not really hard if you're willing to get Dex on something like a Ring for example).

I made this build around the use of The Devouring Diadem, which fits us very well. It gives us EB (which saves us skill points) and has the potential to lower our Mana reservation by a lot. Even though the Diadem is expensive at the start of the league, fortunately it's not the rarest of items, it can be target-farmed via the Catarina boss fight. The best affixes we can get on it are either attributes (particularly Dex) or resistances. Never remove the craft on the Diadem though, it is not possible to recraft it. For enchants, any Blade Blast enchant works. The enchant can be very very had to get so it's not a requirement, just a very nice plus to have. See above for an example of this item.

There are two other unique items that I would call "Core items" of this build, these are Hrimsorrow (or the fated upgrade, Hrimburn), which is very very cheap and lets us easily achieve full Physical-to-Elemental conversion on our Blade Blast (alongside the Phys to Lightning gem), and Taste of Hate, which gives us both damage and survivability. See above for examples of these items.

Since Hrimsorrow are very cheap, we can aim to buy them with a "Spells have +% Crit Chance" corruption implicit, which should be both pretty useful and not overly expensive. In case you didn't know, it is possible to modify the sockets of corrupted items with the crafting bench, so this is a viable alternative. These gloves will eventually be swapped for rare gloves in an endgame setup, however they are very important for the earlier part of our playthrough.

Annoint: Our Amulet Annoint of choice will be Charisma because it will allow us to have extra options for auras. This annoint however is the 3rd or 4th most expensive annoint (2 Golden and 1 Opalescent oils), so I recommend using another annoint before we get to Charisma. A nice and cheap one is Heartseeker, although I will leave more options of which most are just as good.

*Important Update for 3.11 and onwards: since clusters have been nerfed and we were relying on stacking Vengeful Commander notables with the use of Wrath, we can swap Wrath for Herald of Purity and stop annointing Charisma, which will be good for our budget because Golden Oils are expensive. On a cheap budget, go for stuff that needs cheap oils, usually Heartseeker should be very strong for us at any given point. If we get close to the Block cap though, the annoint that stands out the most for damage is Command of Steel. If we inflict Assassin's Mark, then Mark the Prey is a great option.

Nodes for our Annoint to keep an eye on are:

- Mark the Prey (very strong if you use a Mark curse)
- Doom Cast
- Static Blows
- True Strike
- Searing Heat (only okay if you deal fire damage)
- Heartseeker
- Divine Fury
- Divine Wrath
- Divine Judgment
- Command of Steel
- Charisma (very costly)
- Constitution (very costly)

*Some of these nodes are reachable from our position in the tree and are suitable alternatives in case anyone wants to try different options.





For the Boots, remember to get as much Movement Speed as possible on them, or alternatively use the 20% Movement Speed + chance to gain Onslaught craft (which is the best bench craft for us) or any suitable alternative. If we have a lot of currency, a strong and popular option is to get a pair of Boots that has Tailwind, Elusive, or better yet both of them. Elusive is probably better for us than Tailwind, because Tailwind is not directly linked to damage for us and Elusive gives us Dodge. As of 3.11 we can get Elusive from the Passive Tree, which is a very useful alternative, but it's still better if we have it on our Boots because it would allow us to use the 3 passive points on something else. An example of ideal Boots would be a pair of Evasion/ES Two-Toned Boots with Life, Movement Speed, Elusive and 3 Resistance suffixes (Boots like these will be quite expensive).

The Gear slots that are not mentioned can be filled with rare items, we just have to remember to always cap our Elemental Resistances and grab all the Life we can. One particularly good alternative is Warlord Gloves, since Warlord influence can give useful affixes like % Spell Damage and Culling Strike. Apart from that, get any affix that is useful, such as ES, Crit Chance and Multiplier, Cast Speed, AoE, etc.

For our Large Cluster ideally we want an 8 Passive and 2 Socket Jewel that grants Elemental or Spell Damage.

The notables I recommend on an Elemental one are Doryani's Lesson, Vengeful Commander (especially if we're using both Wrath and Hatred) and Sadist (which could be replaced for Prismatic Heart if we really needed Resistances). If we deal damage of all 3 elements, Sadist will be the strongest of these 3 notables. Doryani's Lesson can be swapped for Widespread Destruction.

On a Spell one I recommend Conjured Wall + Arcane Heroism (if we don't have a way to get Arcane Surge, if we do have another way to get it then we should not use this one) and any Notable suffix.

A Physical one can work too, but the only really good Notable on it is Force Multiplier, and the rest range from okay to bad.

In short: we want an [Elemental or Spell] Large Cluster with 8 passives and 2 sockets.

For our Medium Clusters we want 5 Passive (4 Passives would work too) and 1 Socket Jewels that grant either Crit Chance or Aura Effect. In the Aura cluster, the strong combo is Vengeful Commander + Precise Commander. In the Crit Chance cluster I recommend Magnifier, Pressure Points, Precise Commander, Overwhelming Malice or Precise Retaliation, all of these are solid, I suggest OM, 2x PP and one of choice. I suggest checking PoB to see what works best. From what my own PoB tells me, I could suggest getting 2x Pressure Points, one Overwhelming Malice and one Magnifier (if Magnifier doesn't give us +1 AoE Radius for Blade Blast, we take Precise Commander), but honestly all of the Notables I mentioned are useful and great for our build.

Small Clusters are optional (these can be swapped for regular gems). If we choose to use them, we pretty much just want 2 Passive Jewels that grant Life (other options can also work but we really want to stack up Life). The Notable I recommend most is Fettle (this is for a Life Cluster, and other useful options include Sublime Sensation and Blessed). For the non-Notable affixes, I recommend getting Life/ES/Resistances/Dex.

Some PoBs will have Diamond Flasks but keep in mind that such a flask might not be necessary if you have naturally high Crit Chance.

- Includes Leveling Trees and tree for Level 73~, this is start of maps/white maps without Diadem yet, one 5-link https://pastebin.com/GAw6hRYE PS: remember that you must either have both EB and MoM or neither!

- Level 82, upgrades: Diadem / decent rare Staff to Disintegrator / Stygian Vise + Abyssal Jewel / Atziri Flask https://pastebin.com/UTmVyawa

- Level 91, upgrades: Curse Ring / all-around better equipment https://pastebin.com/v9z5GTtp

- Lastly, this is how the character would look like if we had an infinite budget, basically every item is perfect and the tree is modified after the absurd items. This is just to show the ceiling of the build so I don't recommend using this tree unless we're really going all in. https://pastebin.com/KaaQ32sm TLDR: it is possible to actually deal over 1M damage (Sirus Damage) for every Blade Blast that hits the enemy.

One particular thing we can do here, is to grab a Physical to Cold conversion Hatred mod, which we can then couple with an Elemental Conversion mod on a pair of rare Gloves, which we can get as a Crafted Prefix from the crafting bench. Doing this we can abandon our Hrimsorrow and get a pair of Gloves that has Life and Resistances, which will in turn free space on the rest of our items. This will be a pretty advanced thing to do though, since we probably want to aim for a Watcher's Eye that has at least an extra useful mod apart from this one, and Watcher's Eyes are expensive. It should not be hard to get a Watcher's Eye with this conversion mod and at least 1 extra useful affix for around 3ex.

As I mentioned earlier, we can use this combo to achieve full Elemental Conversion, and this will be stronger (but obviously more costly) than using Hrimsorrow. Read the Watcher's Eye section for more details.

Gloves are a very dull item slot for us, we just want them to have high Life and Resistances (Attributes are okay too). For anything special we will need Influence mods, of which the ones I consider useful are the Crusader influence mods, Culling Strike from Warlord, Charges on Kill from Elder/Redeemer or the Faster Casting mod from Shaper. I particularly prefer Warlord for Spell Damage and Culling Strike.

If we stack enough "X% reduced Mana reserved" affixes, we will be able to equip more auras, which will make us stronger. This can give a variety of options.

Example 1: Hatred/Wrath/Zealotry/Discipline in a 4-link setup:
We can swap our Counterweight annoint for Charisma and path towards Influence on the Skill Tree (4-5 extra points). If we also have the 14% reduced Mana reserved from pathing towards Sovereignty, it is mathematically possible to use the 4-link setup mentioned above as long as we put it in our Devouring Diadem (Hatred, Wrath and Zealotry will reserve 27% each, and Discipline will reserve 19%, which adds up exactly to 100%). Keep in mind though that we still want to grab Counterweight in the tree because it gives good damage (5 extra points pathing through Whirling Barrier). This might actually turn out to be a better optimization of this build. Will update if I have more information on this.

Example 2: Hatred-Zealotry-Discipline-Enlighten + Herald of Purity-[Herald of Ash or Arctic Armour]-Enlighten (one Enlighten must be level 4 or we need an extra "1% reduced Mana reserved" which can for example come from a Jewel corruption implicit).

I won't list more, but there are many other variations of this, where we could include other useful auras like Aspect of the Cat/Avian, Haste, Grace, Vitality, etc. For the sake of simplicity I suggest sticking to the aura setup I use myself but feel free to experiment.

We can turn this build into a Dual Wielder (or Single + Shield). This can work because there are Shaper influence affixes that can link Spell Cascade and Faster Casting (among other options) to our Bladefall without the need for extra sockets, which means we can have a 4 or 5-link (or potentially more than 5) on our 1-handed weapon, and thus use the remaining empty sockets on other gems.

Doing this, however, may or may not be worth the cost. We would have to get not only a Wand (or Sceptre/Dagger) that has these extra link mods, but also a second item that also has strong affixes.

As some might know, there are people out there who play Bladefall and Blade Blast on different setups.

Regarding ascendancies, I would say the ones that deserve attention are Pathfinder, Chieftain and Assassin, maybe Elementalist. Regarding the casting ways, there are others besides the dual self cast this build is based on, like Spellslinger, Poet's Pen or Cast on Crit. These are all viable. I personally chose to use dual Self Cast because it's very straightforward and that way we don't 'lose' links and our Blade Blast can be stronger thanks to the extra links and our ability to self cast letting us choose and target our Blast areas very well.

I do believe that doing Cast on Crit has potential. Going this route in my opinion would be best in 1 of 2 ways: with a Shaper influenced Bow that has the "Socketed Gems are linked with level X Cast on Crit" modifier (this way we would be saving a gem link) or with a Bow that has relevant Synthesis Implicits that have the potential to compensate for the extra link (for example Spell Damage, there are simple ways to abuse this craft and do it for pretty cheap when comparing to non-Harvest leagues). Now, in this bow we would put at least our Blade Blast alongside a Bow Skill that will be used to trigger it, plus a bunch of gems that get our damage up. This would ideally be coupled with extra casting methods like a Maloney's Mechanism and Asenath's Chant, which would be used to cast a bunch of extra Bladefalls (and it's also a possibility to put Bladefall in the Bow alongside Blade Blast), this way we would be getting a lot of blades in the ground and power up our Blade Blast pops even more.