If you're looking for the feeling of powerwashing rares off the map like stains on your garage, this build may be for you.

It's been a project of mine for the past couple weeks, and I think I've stumbled on something pretty good. The idea of the build is to leverage Ice Shards (we'll see why later) to consume the maximum of power charges per second possible, to generate enough infusions to sustain full uptime, and have the triggers in turn generate enough power charges to continue the cycle indefinitely. This results on dealing big damage at ice shards speeds, which is pretty impressive DPS. It's a very combo-y build relying on some specific interactions and math, so if you're a fan of Jousis, ItsRealNeato et al, you will probably enjoy tinkering with it.

Here's a T16, irradiated, corrupted nexus with a fairly tanky boss at the end (monster level 82) showcase. My gear is nothing special, altogether must be around 3-4 divs.

Here's the pobb.in: https://pobb.in/zCh0w4bOpT2i

Pros

• Great clear, great single target DPS. Can take all content easily if you're good at strafing/dodging while shooting.

• Very high mobility build. The main skill uses the Mobility support, plus we're allocating most movespeed and move penalty reduction nodes on the tree, so shooting feels almost like running.

• Lots of tiny optimizations and tweaks you can do to make it yours.

Cons

• Squishy (defensive layers are your bog standard eva+ES hybrid with wind dancer and ghost shrouds, plus a bit of MoM).

• You have to be precise, or you might need to "restart" the engine, see below.

How it works

The main mechanism of the build is consuming power charges with ice shards and generating them with the combination of a corrupted Redflare Conduit and the infused weapon triggers. When the "engine" is running, the math works out roughly like this:

• For each 2 infusion charges, on average we trigger 4 infusion pops (thanks to infused avatar).

• For each 4 infusion pops, we generate on average slightly less than 1 power charge (24% chance on redflare).

• For each power charge, we generate 2 infusion charges, and the cycle repeats.

Now, there is fine print on the above: As you've seen in the second point, we generate slightly less than the necessary amount of charges to sustain the engine indefinitely. Here's where Choir of the Storm comes into play: At the speed we're critting, we're reliably triggering ~3 lightning bolts per second, which maintains a steady stream of power charges that keeps the engine running.

Choir of the storm also performs an important secondary role: when clearing, we hit a lot of targets very quickly, which means we can go over Redflare's limit and get shocked. Lightning Bolt has Commiserate support, which removes your own shock and uses it to empower the shocks it applies, so the drawback of Redflare is leveraged offensively. Handy!

Since we're using Choir, we convert all cold damage to lightning to benefit from the crit resistance bypass bonus.

Kickstarting the engine

Even though the engine is self-sustaining, you can sometimes get unlucky and drop to zero power/infusion charges. When this happens, kicking it back into gear is often just a case of spamming ice shards until the Choir of the Storm triggers generate a power charge, but if you don't want to wait (or the enemy you're starting the engine against is particularly evasive, which messes with your crit chance) you can instead cast Ball Lightning with Unleash, which causes a huge amount of hits and definitely gives you the power charges to keep going.

In any case, this is a very infrequent scenario (I think it only happens once at the beginning of the showcase above) and it can be avoided by just being precise with shooting (i.e. not wasting shots that don't hit anything). I find that this results in a fun minigame by itself: rather than just spamming, you're letting out short semi-auto bursts that clear packs.

Against bosses, I prefer to initiate with Cluster Grenade as it bleeds and hobbles, reducing the boss's evasion and ensuring 100% crit chance on infusion pops.

Why Ice Shards?

You may be wondering why ice shards and none of the other "fast" crossbow skills. Truth is, they each have their pros and cons:

• Shockburst: Great when leveling, as it can be used alongside Orb of Storms to generate power charges before having access to Choir of the Storm. The shock-pops are nice but ultimately not too useful for this build as their damage is negligible compared to the infusion pops.

• Rapid: Very good sustained DPS because of the big clip size, though I find that at the reload speeds we have, it rarely matters. Faster than Shockburst so higher DPS.

• Armor Piercing: Slower, but actually very good if you can afford a 6L and set it up to bleed and hobble: this is the best approach against evasive bosses.

However, Ice Shards takes the victory for a simple reason: it's ground targeted. This means aiming is much, much easier: you can just click in the vicinity of the target and it will be struck, as opposed to the others which require actually landing the shot. At 550% firing speed, it's tied with rapid on most DPS, with the only drawback of a smaller clip size.