[3.21] Saqawal's Twister Inquisitor | 10M+ DPS | mostly-AFK Simulacrum Wave 30

***To the folks at GGG who see this: please please please revert the cooldown changes to saqawals if the reduced duration crucible nodes are gone, or at least buff the skill to compensate. The nerfs are fine this league - some people may say otherwise - but every saqawals build will be effectively bricked going forward. I, like many others, were drawn into this game with its array of non-intuitive builds (and some of us eventually spent money because of this impression). Please don't kill this kind of build diversity***



To me the real game is now sweet sweet Path of Building. Checking the boxes and watching the dps go up and up hnnnnng so satisfying. Uh oh new build idea? Better get that tree allocated and make the same cluster jewels for the 20th time. The desktop application I need my graphics card for is the simulator that has an unfortunate barrier called currency, which is necessary to run more characters through the simulator. So I came to the conclusion that the most efficient way to get currency while playing the TRUE game was to make an AFK build, and the best thing to farm was high-wave simulacrum. What better skill to use than saqawal's twisters?

Pros:
Tanky boi
No need to move during delve or simulacrum (up to wave ~27)
Zip around instantly when mapping and do 80%+ delirious with ease
2 neurons required - press Q to warp, press RMB for mark

Cons:
Surprisingly weak to degens
Gets stuck on terrain cause I guess you can't teleport over rocks
Gets rekt by flask drain simulacrum mod
Have to pay close attention in simulacrum waves 27+, as they're easy to fail with bad flask management and getting oneshot by Kosis slam
Pay4visibiliy - need to put on a spark MTX otherwise you can't see anything

Build Basics:

Crucible came with some handy new nodes that allow for 10% reduced duration/10-15% cooldown recovery. This is HUGE for Saqawals, as just the helmet, 2 timeclasps, and 1 warped timepiece are required to make the build function at baseline.

The Saqawal's Flock helmet states: "Trigger Level 20 Twister when you gain Avian's Might or Avian's Flight"

Avian's Might and Flight are buffs granted by Aspect of the Avian (a beastiary skill that works kind of like a herald). At baseline, the duration of these buffs is 4 seconds each, which will alternate back and forth between them like a pendulum. Our goal is to minimize the duration of each buff to the smallest they can go. We do this with:


These all have reduced duration, and with reduced duration on the tree and crucible passives on the weapons

You can achieve 99% reduced skill effect duration, bringing the duration of each avian buff to 0.01*4sec = 0.04secs. ***note - the rolls on your ammy and rings don't matter as long as the sum does not exceed 99% reduced duration in total! The twisters will not proc if you have >=100% reduced duration.

The big bad people at GGG took a big doodoo on the build by adding a 100ms cooldown on twister procs. What this means is that even though we are able to trivially hit close to the server tick rate for avian buff alternations, twisters will not come out every time this happens. So instead of 15 twisters coming out every second, we only have 10, severely cutting our DPS. To solve this, we need to hit at least 52% cooldown recovery for the 0.066ms server breakpoint. This is done with at least 25% CDR on the crucible tree passives (a 10% on vulconus and 15% on the stat stick offhand), a nice 19% roll on the belt, and 8% eldritch implicit on the boots.


There's other ways of adding up to 52%, like having 2 15% rolls on the weapon crucible tree for example, but just make sure you hit that threshold!

Weapon-wise I'm using a BIS main hand vulconus for the fat flat added damage to spells with Inquisitor's Instruments of Virtue Ascendancy. Its incredibly annoying to get a RSED/CDR crucible node on this weapon, but absolutely critical. A rare with a bunch of flat ele damage might work as well but will not do as much damage. The offhand stat stick should have the 15% CDR node and -3% crit/60% global crit multiplier. The -3% crit downside only seems to affect the weapon's base crit.

Gloves have life, ele res, chaos res, and much needed dex.


Being Simulacrum-Ready:

When you look at builds that can do simulacrum safely, they all share common features. They generally have high single target dps (10mil+), and importantly have high damage mitigation through +max res, raw phys mitigation, critical strike prevention, block, suppress, armour and evasion, and good lifepool recovery. With saqawals and inquisitor, recovery is well-covered, as each twister tick can insta-heal with life gain on hit and insta-leach. The problem is getting the other pieces of mitigation when the helmet, rings, and amulet slots are already taken up.

+max res, critical strike protection - Brass Dome

raw phys mitigation - being stationary is critical to our defenses. We use arctic armor and soul of tukohama in the pantheon, which give physical damage reduction while stationary.

block - Replica Rumi's concoction. Arguably the most important piece of the build. This gives a large amount of attack and spell block at the cost of turning into a statue, which doesn't matter since we're going to afk anyways. This needs the Hillock 28% flask quality for increased duration.

I also use a precision watchers eye with flask charge on critical strike to ensure high flask uptime. ***note I have replica rumi's as used when flask charges are full while my other flasks are used at the end of effect. This is important to optimize flask uptime for replica rumi's, as the flask charge on crit only allocates flask charges to non-full flasks. Basically, if all of your other flasks are already full, all that sweet flask charge juice will fill replica rumi's instead.

other - Bloodnotch gives an insane amount of effective life, especially since we take the ES stun mastery which makes most small hits stun me. With my roll, jewel makes it so 48% of damage taken from hits that stun are recovered (this is a piece of the build that can be improved with a better roll).


Casual progenesis gives alot of survivability.


Make sure you are chaos res-capped because the phys-as-chaos mods really hurt

If need to tank Kosis slams or big hits, press button for Vaal arctic armor and take no damage for 1 sec. It's an extra button, I know it's confusing.


Cast when stunned molten shell and frost shield setup
Cast when stunned blazing salvo to hit ranged mobs that try to outrange you

Finally, I use nature's patience, a small cluster jewel keystone which lets me take 20% less damage taken and have 20% chance to deal double damage but only when stationary for over 5 seconds.


Highlight video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u9ffSCIezo

Shaper mostly AFK kill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_Zf6TzDeAs

Simulacrum wave 30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz72D6zd6xE

Thanks for reading!

Hi!
First of all great thinking of inquis for it!
Currently also running it but with more budget still working on some things feels fine for now but i think it's just not tanky enough for some stuff for example it's really scuffed opening essences they hit like a truck and i'm unable to tank that.
Would be fun messaging around with you a bit maybe we can work out some ideas for improvement!

Edit:
Seems like Inquis is more dmg for sure but you can't push it as hard into defensive as you can with Chieftain so for Ultra high investment Chieftain seems to be the better choice.
What instakilled inquis with mageblood pure defensive flasks doesn't even tickle Chieftain with not pure defensive flasks.

Congratz on build of the week.

What's the price tag? Uniques should be pretty cheap, what about the rest? How did you level? :)

Btw, your PoB differs from your post - e.g. no power charge on crit in chest

Yo! Appreciate the shoutout at the bottom there! just saw this hit build of the week and im shocked!

Couple things as far as calcs go, unfortunately, i was wrong on the twister proc rate on my guide, as well as yours D:

the proc rate still does have to follow the 33ms server tick rate unfortunately
So basically, you can get 30.30 procs, 15.15, 10.10, 7.58, 6.06, 5.05 and so on.

So basically, if you hit anywhere between 0.00 and 0.033 for your buff duration, you get 30 procs. 0.34-0.66, you get 15 procs. anything in between, doesnt matter.

With that in mind, you are just barely away on your boots/gloves to get to the next breakpoint, which would be a straight 50% dps increase, as you'd be going from 10 procs/second to 15 procs.

with either a 20/23 or 21/20 less duration with 16% offhand, you need atleast a -1.90 boots/gloves to hit the next breakpoint. with 21/23, you can use -1.80's

Heres a link to a calculator i found for the proc rates, i did not make it and unfortunately, i don't know exactly who did, as it was linked to me randomly D:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VQGkQCYIGkZ5UfuqJZcCl2HYHoRn0NcpduERgOM67wc/edit?usp=sharing

I was shocked as well! Hopefully this doesn't affect prices too much going forward, as I would like to play it again in future leagues lol.

I was also wondering about the server tick rate, but unfortunately didn't have enough currency to really test it and couldn't find a 21/23 less duration all league - thanks for posting it here and letting everyone know. Huge difference in DPS!

There's a few things I want to add to the build guide, namely videos showing hit rates with faster proj vs none vs slower proj, and some vids showing you can get 100% flask uptime on a single target for 2 flasks with the surgeon's mod. I'll also update with your info here. Anything else you can think of that should be added here? I would like this to be a good resource for other saqawal build creators to to use as a reference (similar to how I used your 3.15 guide!)

Build of the weeeeeek! Super cool. I'll have my eye on it in 3.20! :D

"

m02ph3u5 wrote:

Congratz on build of the week.

What's the price tag? Uniques should be pretty cheap, what about the rest? How did you level? :)

Btw, your PoB differs from your post - e.g. no power charge on crit in chest

The uniques are currently the most expensive part because of the BotW video. If you're looking to hit a similar breakpoint, you need perfect -rolls on the timeclasps/warped timepiece and nearly perfectly rolled gloves and boots which are not only expensive, but hard to find in the current economy. If you have 20 Divines you can get gloves with -1.9, but beyond that there are no usable gloves on trade. At this point it may even be worth running Saqawal portals.

"

PapercutCarnage wrote:

"

m02ph3u5 wrote:

Congratz on build of the week.

What's the price tag? Uniques should be pretty cheap, what about the rest? How did you level? :)

Btw, your PoB differs from your post - e.g. no power charge on crit in chest

The uniques are currently the most expensive part because of the BotW video. If you're looking to hit a similar breakpoint, you need perfect -rolls on the timeclasps/warped timepiece and nearly perfectly rolled gloves and boots which are not only expensive, but hard to find in the current economy. If you have 20 Divines you can get gloves with -1.9, but beyond that there are no usable gloves on trade. At this point it may even be worth running Saqawal portals.

Thanks!
I've seen the calculator but do you happen to have the breakpoints at hand? How much worse will it be with more crappy gear? ;)

"

m02ph3u5 wrote:

"

PapercutCarnage wrote:

"

m02ph3u5 wrote:

Congratz on build of the week.

What's the price tag? Uniques should be pretty cheap, what about the rest? How did you level? :)

Btw, your PoB differs from your post - e.g. no power charge on crit in chest

The uniques are currently the most expensive part because of the BotW video. If you're looking to hit a similar breakpoint, you need perfect -rolls on the timeclasps/warped timepiece and nearly perfectly rolled gloves and boots which are not only expensive, but hard to find in the current economy. If you have 20 Divines you can get gloves with -1.9, but beyond that there are no usable gloves on trade. At this point it may even be worth running Saqawal portals.

Thanks!
I've seen the calculator but do you happen to have the breakpoints at hand? How much worse will it be with more crappy gear? ;)

Here is all the breakpoints i felt were relevant and the boots/gloves needed to hit it, i figured id add in the 10 proc breakpoints as well, for those who need it.

With a 21/23 Less Duration, AND any of these configs to hit 15 procs/second

+2, +13% quality offhand, you need at least -1.90 boots/gloves
+2, +14% quality offhand, you need at least -1.87 boots/gloves
+2, +15% quality offhand, you need at least -1.82 boots/gloves
+2, +16% quality offhand, you need at least -1.80 boots/gloves


With a 21/20 Less Duration, AND any of these configs to hit 15 procs/second

+2, +13% quality offhand, you need at least -2.00 boots/gloves
+2, +14% quality offhand, you need at least -1.97 boots/gloves
+2, +15% quality offhand, you need at least -1.94 boots/gloves
+2, +16% quality offhand, you need at least -1.90 boots/gloves

With a 20/23 Less Duration, AND any of these configs to hit 15 procs/second

+2, +13% quality offhand, you need at least -1.97 boots/gloves
+2, +14% quality offhand, you need at least -1.94 boots/gloves
+2, +15% quality offhand, you need at least -1.90 boots/gloves
+2, +16% quality offhand, you need at least -1.87 boots/gloves

With a 20/20 Less Duration, AND any of these configs to hit 15 procs/second

+2, +13% quality offhand, you Cannot hit 15 procs/second Breakpoint
+2, +14% quality offhand, you Cannot hit 15 procs/second Breakpoint
+2, +15% quality offhand, you need at least -2.00 boots/gloves
+2, +16% quality offhand, you need at least -1.97 boots/gloves

With a 20/20 Less Duration, AND any of these configs to hit 10 procs/second

+2, +13% quality offhand, you need at least -1.09 boots/gloves
+2, +14% quality offhand, you need at least -1.04 boots/gloves
+2, +15% quality offhand, you need at least -1.00 boots/gloves
+2, +16% quality offhand, you need at least -0.95 boots/gloves
No offhand Required - at least -1.62 boots/gloves

"

P2W almost unplayable without MTX
Is almost basically RF with extra steps

Made my day lol