Fyregrass' Comprehensive Storm Brand Assassin Guide - Currently Dead Build. Revisit in 2 weeks.

In the LightningSlinger PoB, how come there are 2 spellslinger setups in the wands? In the levelling guide, it is mentioned to use Spellslinger+arc+WoC+ball lightning and then when you get storm brand you can use that as the 4th slot. What does that mean?

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Joranjoran wrote:

In the LightningSlinger PoB, how come there are 2 spellslinger setups in the wands? In the levelling guide, it is mentioned to use Spellslinger+arc+WoC+ball lightning and then when you get storm brand you can use that as the 4th slot. What does that mean?

Spellslinger reserves a portion of your mana for the spells it casts. So by splitting it up, you can use 3 spells without needing a 4b link, and you can eventually do 4 spells without needing a 5b link. It's just easier to use two spellslinger setups.

I just find two 3b wands to craft lightning damage on. One wand is Spellslinger+arc+wave and the other wand is spellslinger+ball+brand.

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KappKapp wrote:

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Joranjoran wrote:

In the LightningSlinger PoB, how come there are 2 spellslinger setups in the wands? In the levelling guide, it is mentioned to use Spellslinger+arc+WoC+ball lightning and then when you get storm brand you can use that as the 4th slot. What does that mean?

Spellslinger reserves a portion of your mana for the spells it casts. So by splitting it up, you can use 3 spells without needing a 4b link, and you can eventually do 4 spells without needing a 5b link. It's just easier to use two spellslinger setups.

I just find two 3b wands to craft lightning damage on. One wand is Spellslinger+arc+wave and the other wand is spellslinger+ball+brand.

And i assume the spellslingers need to be high enough level to get the mana reservation to 50% on each?

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KappKapp wrote:

If you're willing to play a bit of a longer game for the elevated explode chest in 3.14, you can somewhat deterministically guarantee explode without having to alt spam.

1. Get a level 85 crusader chest.

2. Spam Reroll/Reroll+ Phys harvest crafts until you have both "Phys taken as Lightning" and "Reflects Phys to Melee Attackers".

3. You need 1 open prefix and 1 open suffix, so YOLO annul as needed.

4. Craft Prefixes cannot be changed.

5. Use a Reroll or Reroll+ Phys harvest craft. This guarantees the explode mod.

6. YOLO annul Phys taken as lightning, and make sure you have an open suffix.

You can pick up on Fyre's crafting steps at step 5. This method will take longer as you farm up the crafts, but should be quite a bit cheaper than alt spamming unless you fail step 6 a bunch of times or annuls are super expensive.

I’ve been told this method of crafting explode is likely being removed. If it isn’t, I’ll of course put it in. GGG have already said they’re removing tags from mods that can be guaranteed due to not having enough other mods with shared tags and explode chest is apparently being mentioned in the manifesto so it seemed highly likely this method wasn’t going to survive.

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Joranjoran wrote:

In the LightningSlinger PoB, how come there are 2 spellslinger setups in the wands? In the levelling guide, it is mentioned to use Spellslinger+arc+WoC+ball lightning and then when you get storm brand you can use that as the 4th slot. What does that mean?

You need to wait till act 7 roughly (level 10 spellslinger to get low enough mana reservation to have a 4th spell such as Storm brand)

The reason there are different set ups is because it doesn’t matter, you simply need those spells linked to spellslinger gems. You could even use 4x 2 links if you wanted, they don’t have to be in wands or anywhere specific.

Nice to find a good guide for this.

I did my own variant on Elementalist and ended up crafting a Staff from scratch which gave me ~20%ish more damage in POB vs two Ele Pen Void Batteries.

I just kinda figured out everything on my own, would love to get your thoughts.

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It was easily my strongest character this league and I will be looking at league starting it if there's nothing crazy in the patch notes.

What are your thoughts on Elementalist vs Assassin especially from a new league perspective?

Do you use power siphon or Frenzy to trigger Spell SLinger??

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Fyregrass wrote:

I have updated the guide for 3.14. I will provide further updates as more info on Ultimatum is released, but I am finally recommending this build as league start viable with the new lightning slinger and MoM PoBs.

The build is also much tankier now. Enjoy guys!

This is the most enjoyable build i've played. Looking forward to play it again in 3.14. Thank you for your hard work!

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dagul23 wrote:

This is the most enjoyable build i've played. Looking forward to play it again in 3.14. Thank you for your hard work!

Thanks for the kind words :)

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jollathanRogers wrote:

Do you use power siphon or Frenzy to trigger Spell SLinger??

Neither, we basic attack. There is a brief period before you add storm brand that you have the mana for frenzy, but it doesn't last long anyway.

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livejamie wrote:

Nice to find a good guide for this.

I did my own variant on Elementalist and ended up crafting a Staff from scratch which gave me ~20%ish more damage in POB vs two Ele Pen Void Batteries.

I just kinda figured out everything on my own, would love to get your thoughts.


It was easily my strongest character this league and I will be looking at league starting it if there's nothing crazy in the patch notes.

What are your thoughts on Elementalist vs Assassin especially from a new league perspective?

I think my friend showed me your profile yesterday, the gear looks really solid. Do you have a PoB for it? I'd love to compare the staff to void batteries! I'd say this is probably as far as you'll get a PC elementalist without going down the road of double corrupts and mirror tier gear in every slot, it definitely looks nice. You may want to double check for yourself but on any setup where you have 50+ resist pen/reduction, having lightning damage to spells on your helm instead of -9% resist SHOULD come out ahead. We tried it on a whole range of Assassin set ups, even ones that were still running Ephemeral Bond amulet, and the hunter/warlord helm was always superior. Given that you are running Badge AND have 50 ele reduction from WOC/EE alone, the Hunter variant should be far superior. But still, very very nice gear and I assume you can blast through every facet of the game.

As far as Ele vs Assassin goes. I think my friend explained it best in his reddit post but maybe you aren't the same guy and he's asleep still so I cant ask him, but basically, Ele is better on league start, Assassin overtake it after a 15-20ex investment and Elementalist pulls back ahead at 150-200ex. The main thing is that Assassin's crit multi per PC, base crit and 1 extra power charge unfortunately blows elementalist out of the water for power charge stacking once you hit around 7-9PCs. Elementalist has to ditch power charge stacking and double down on gem level scaling to overtake the potential of a 12 PC assassin, however, the difference isn't too massive. Some time ago on PoE.Ninja there were a number of PC stacking elementalists that were ahead of Assassins just by virtue of stacking higher amounts of crit multi in their cobalt and crimson jewels.

Elementalist is always the superior Ascendancy from a defensive perspective however. The Chaos Golem and Primal Aegis defensive layers are insane and honestly borderline overpowered. I would be surprised if they don't get nerfed next patch or the patch after. Elementalist is one of the strongest offensive ascendancies and it comes with better defensive tools than almost all the melee ascendancies. If you enjoy it and aren't confident playing an Assassin/Glass Cannon, I would recommend Elementalists.

Thanks for the response, you and your friend on reddit have both been very helpful. He did provide me with great answers but it's better to have them here than in deep in the daily question thread on the subreddit. :)

Here is my Elementalist Staff POB: https://pastebin.com/xczEfzeG

It's level 98, for the last two points I'd grab Doryanni's Lesson in the top right cluster jewel.

In my testing, the -9% Res is slightly better but maybe I'm doing POB wrong?

Glad to know 11 PC Elementalist is competitive with 12 PC Assassin, I think I might use your guide as a baseline and do it again if golems aren't changed.

It's exciting to see that Badge might be a normal price this league as it's a global drop, we shall see. :)